That’s cool. The original Fallout is still one of my favorite games and close to how I envision an “ideal RPG” to be. (An ideal RPG is of course a stupid concept as this genre has so many different types of games to offer. My favorite RPG of all time for example, Might and Magic 6, has a completely different focus than this game.)
But having a really well fleshed out world and setting as is the case here, and then having a character system and game mechanics that allows you to solve all or most quests in a number of different ways is a really great way to make an RPG. And close to the spirit of the original pen and paper games.
Fallout especially deserves credit for all the non-violent ways you can solve a task and for the bleak post-apocalyptic setting, where in a number of cases where there are no good choices, but only bad ones and you have to chose the one that your character most likely would have picked.
This is a wonderful game that really stand the test of time.
More diversity in games is by and large a very good thing. Like with many things, there also exists downsides to journalists and studios being eager to implement diversity that are legitimate to discuss. As long as it is done in a constructive and respectful manner. For example when historical authenticity and diversity does not align in games where historical authenticity is wanted.
This however has nothing to do with that. If people are criticizing and harassing a developer over a game in an African fantasy setting having an African protagonist because of supposed "wokeness", then that is really taking this "culture war" rubbish into a new low. I don't really know what to say about that. Touch some grass?
Yeah I also prefer to configure modern games for personal exploration instead of having them push things on you.
I can understand how you feel about physical media. I have still kept all my PC game manuals and maps and using them instead of some digital recreation is an overall better experience. But for all those games I only own as digital copies, reading a manual on a pad comes quite close to the real thing. And feels vastly different than using some kind of spoilerific fan-made guide, which I only occasionally use to look up some specific kind of mechanics for certain games.
The manual at least can still be found on the net in a high resolution scan, and I would assume the same is true for the map as well.
When playing old computer and console games that are new to me, I often download the manual to my pad in advance or while playing, to learn about game mechanics and in some cases to really dive into the backstory and setting of a game. To me, this is almost like having a manual in my hands. Having it on a phone is not as good I would think, but it works great for some people.
The kind of manuals and guides that some of these RPGs and action adventure games got on the NES and Mega Drive is a bit of a double-edged sword though.
On the one hand, having a lot of stuff related to a game to read about and look at in a manual is very cool. Especially when you are a young kid or just an old man really excited about a game. And most console games did get very shallow and short manuals compared to the massive tomes of lore, art, mechanics and reference material you got for many computer games.
But due to Nintendo of America and SEGA's low confidence in American console gamers ability to understand "complex" RPGs and adventures, they often spoiled many parts of a game, and in some cases the whole game, by giving away screenshot-maps and solutions to puzzles in the manual or guide that came with the western release of the game.
To this day there are still some gamers who think that these games were designed to be played with guides! As a kid you didn't have a critical view of this of course but thankfully this got some pushback at least from the more adult-oriented magazine EGM, who criticized both SEGA and Nintendo for giving away such guides with certain games.
@KingMike
"The US artwork isn't telling me that much about what the gameplay itself I-N-C-L-U-D-E-S."
I don't think they differ that much in that respect. The only reason I know its referencing the job system is because I have played the game and recognize the character classes. But if I hadn't played the game before, I would have assumed that it was an illustration of the starting party and some of the more important NPC's in the game.
Thinking about it, I don't really think telling you what genre a game is, is the main job of the front cover. The screenshots on the back cover and any text on both sides already does a much better job of that. The main job of the front cover is to get your interest right away and also make the game look so interesting that you are tempted to buy it.
But I will say that the more I look at the North American art, the less I like it. It works really well at a glance and probably long enough to get you to hand over your cash to the clerk at the register. But if you bought the game half a day in advance of actually being able to play it or more, and you spent a lot of time reading the manual and looking at the cover art, the Japanese game has a lot more to offer in the case of this game. I voted for the NA version, but would probably vote for the Japanese version now instead.
With that said I do think western-style cover artwork fits perfectly on these 8-bit Japanese JRPGs. Japanese RPGs are very much based on ideas from both western RPGs and western fantasy art and writing. They have certainly created their own styles which are also very recognizable and different from the ones in the west. But when they try to invoke a "medieval" fantasy setting in their games, they draw upon many of the same tropes as a western game with the same setting.
People who mostly just like Japanese roleplaying games may feel that westernizing a game somewhat by giving it a more western cover is making it more generic. But if you appreciate both styles like me, I think it makes sense to also be open to the advantages of interpreting an 8-bit game in a more western way.
When it comes to console games, I think the peak of cover art was reached on the NES. Both for American, European and Japanese releases. Later consoles have also had a lot of good artwork, but I feel like it has been a slow but steady decline since then. That may just be the bias of me looking at those covers with childlike wonder back in the day, but I really appreciate the wall of difference between what the artwork was portraying in these 8-bit games, and what the NES and other similar machines actually could give you on screen.
Being able to use your imagination is a wonderful thing.
With that said I do really like what Toriyama is trying to do there with the castle and the landscape at the bottom. In my opinion a lot of the best fantasy artwork for any medium concentrates on evocative landscapes that gives you a view into another world and builds up the illusion that this world exists.
Two of my favorite scenes from videogames are from the early Final Fantasy games where you see a vast landscape and a castle in the back or foreground:
And on a similar tangent, in the metal world there are a lot of bands with fantasy lyrics and a fantasy image that has very cheesy and run-of-the-mill cover art. Sometimes cheesy is also good and enjoyable, but when in comes to metal covers with fantasy themes I always found the Austrian band Summoning to have the best and most tasteful covers. Almost all of them are focused on landscapes, often with a fortress of some sort as well:
Any of these would have fit really well as the cover art for a computer RPG, and one of artworks here was actually used as the cover for an obscure Amiga/PC RPG, though it originally was commissioned for a novel.
Akira Toriyama's art has a classic style that is very likable. But I do find the western art a little more intriguing, and I certainly would have been more intrigued by it back in the day. I go for the North American one.
Both pieces of artwork are pulled off quite well and and do a good job of getting people interested in the game and telling what kind of a game it is.But looking at them with a more critical eye there are also things to find fault with.
The idea behind the American one is a simple and good one. Having the focus on a lot of shiny weapons and some kind of mystical artifact in a way that partly feels like you have stumbled upon a great treasure. But it isn't very imaginative and while it probably wouldn't have bothered me back in the day, I'm much more a fan of realistic weapons these days over the overembellished and unrealistic ones on display here.
The Toriyama artwork seems like a great idea on paper. It has a large amount of characters, a dragon, a world map and a castle with a landscape during sunset. But while it looks nice enough, there isn't much that is really interesting about it. There are a lot of other Japanese covers in this style with a much better composition.
There seems to be a little less of that these days due to among other things, one Miyamoto's excellent electronic recreations of his own free-roaming childhood adventures.
But in my country at least (Norway), children are still allowed to roam free a lot when they are old enough to handle the traffic in their area. Whenever I read about the US or speak with Americans, I get the feeling that most Americans keep their children constantly supervised because of the mostly false media-created panic about strangers hiding on every corner.
As much as I like electronic gaming myself, it is quite melancholic to see how much time all kinds of screen devices have replaced time that kids used to spend on other things.
I feel happy that I grew up both in the "analogue age" and the "digital age" and got to experience both of them in my formative years. I also never owned any consoles myself as a kid, I only played them when visiting friends or borrowed theirs, and I am very thankful to my parents for that in retrospect, which both led me to read a lot and play and explore a lot outside..
The way I feel about it is that media and culture that are from 2000 and onwards are fairly recent of origin. And it terms of music and movies, only things created in the mid-60s and backwards are “old”, even though it is a bit before my time. But when discussing computer games, anything from the seventies and backwards are ancient relics that are inherently impressive, no matter their actual quality.
Yeah, I thought something similar when I read this subject. “Retro” is a word that signifies that something is not current, that it is a little cool for people into it and that it has a style or form that deviates somewhat from what is contemporary.
So if gaming keep changing at the slow rate it currently has for the last twenty years, then the word “retro” may change its meaning a little to just mean older and not different when the topic is gaming. That isn’t very strange as different words have different meanings in different contexts. Or perhaps another word suddenly takes off and replaces “retrogaming”.
Different retro communities and people seem to have different ideas about what “retro” means. And I have no problem with that. If something of a certain age is unwanted to discuss at some place, there is certainly a lot of other places to discuss it. And bending the rules a little is usually not a problem either. I frequent a lot of different retro-communities and I do have strong opinions on a lot of things, including silly ones like how you define genres. But what is called retro or not isn’t something I think much about.
In general I think in terms of console generations, not whether a system is retro or not. For PC games it is more fluid.
About Dragon Warrior 2 on the NES, I think its difficulty and supposed lack of balance is highly exaggerated..
When I played through it (blind) I was actually happy that there was a JRPG where there was a little pushback and you actually had to think a little about how you spent your resources. In many games in this genre you are offered a lot of tools, but the difficulty is so low that you can get through the game by using the same commands 98% of the time. Dragon Warrior 2 required you to actually think about things and I liked that.
There was a clear difficulty spike with The Road to Rhone, Rhone and the final tower, but it all seemed very well thought through and balanced to me. With for example the monsters that can eradicate your whole party only existing on a small strip of land right after the last save point, so if they killed you, you only lost a few minutes of play time at most.
In total I only died 10 times when playing the game. Compare that to most action games on the NES and that is a really small number. Even in the easier action games on the system, I died a lot more times before I beat them.
I’ve seen some claims about there being a party imbalance in Dragon Warrior 2. But this seems to be people not being able to utilize the two spellcasting members of the party very well. If you experiment with the spells they have, you will find that several of them are very useful. Or perhaps this idea of imbalance comes from the idea that all party members should do an equal amount of damage. But this kind of thinking about game balance only makes for boring and generic games. I’ve always preferred asymmetric balance, both in strategy games and RPGs. Modern thinking about multiplayer balance in single player games makes them less interesting then they have to be.
I’ve also seen some people claim that this is a game that requires a lot of grinding, but unlike Dragon Warrior 1 that wasn’t my experience. When I played through it I only grinded at three spots, and only on one of them did I spend much time on doing it. Meanwhile when I played through Dragon Warrior 1, at least 33% of my playtime was spent on grinding.
Of course if you have already played through the game before, and especially if you remember it well, there will be some grinding. Because the game balance in all these games is based upon you having to explore the game world and not immediately knowing where you have to go. And likewise if you ruin a game for yourself by using a guide there will of course be a ton of grinding. But then you only have yourself to blame.
Yeah, the NES, game boy color and some of the SNES soundtracks sounds great, but a lot of what has come after that, hasn’t been of very good quality soundwise. Apart from the orchestral soundtracks. The quality of the compositions is a very different thing, they’ve been excellent in all the games in this series that I have played.
I wonder who they will use as a composer in the next entry in the series though. Sugiyama didn’t finish his career on his highest note, but he has a really impressive legacy that probably feels quite imposing for whoever gets the job of being his successor.
The original NES game and the surprisingly good SNES remake is more than enough for me. I don’t need a modern visual style or a “budget orchestra” (ala the Final Fantasy Pixel Remasters) in this classic.
It’s most likely a question of economics, not of “laziness”. When you are selling a product you both want to cover all your costs and make a profit from it. These games are selling for a very low price. I doubt that it would be easy to still make a profit if they also had to translate them. That requires both people with technical skills, language skills and full pay for all of them.
Of course the people who sell these games could sell them for a higher price, which would cover the translation costs. But my impression is that most gamers aren’t willing to pay higher prices for games as old as these. Unless the original graphics and sound have been replaced with a crappier and more modern interpretation.
So sadly it seems like trying to sell old Japanese games like these in a legitimate way, will always lose out to fan-translation projects which are offered for free.
The original Link’s Awakening in monochrome is still the definitive version of that game. A lot of the colors in the DX version are garish and unpleasant, like in many re-colored game boy original games. Adding an overpowered item late in the game was also not a great idea. But that does of course not mean that the DX version is bad, in most ways it is still an excellent game.
The later remake is also very cool, but the major change in esthetics makes it into a different game altogether.
Back in the day when there were only a few themes to Lego sets, like space, pirate and knights, I would have been very surprised to see a Zelda Lego set.
These days I’m not, it makes perfect sense to squeeze a little extra money out of a target group by combining two properties with strong nostalgic value like this. I’m glad I’m not a collector.
From this description it sounds like there will be clear progress made even though the savegame is lost. Either through you knowing more about the game world, through other mechanisms or both. Not telling too much is a good idea if you want players to enjoy the game’s mysteries.
I also thinks this art style looks a lot more interesting than the typical indie quasi-retro pixel style.
I think it’s cool they are doing something fresh and new with old NES games. It is one of their most popular and cherished consoles that a lot of us keeps returning to over and over again.
Maybe it’s not quite as fresh and new as when they released the first NES Remix, but it is still Nintendo doing something new with their old games and that is interesting to many people.
Sure, you can find much more value for no money by digging into community-created content based on their old games by using romhacks and Retro Achievements, but this is content that is made by Nintendo themself and that still counts for something.
“ In hindsight, I'm also really disappointed that the Gen III Pokémon games hadn't done more with the diving/deep sea concept. It's crazy to think that there was a grand total of TWO deep sea Pokémon that were catchable in the wild ”
It’s a good thing though that there were no deep sea Pokémon in Pokémon Go.
Unlike most people who doesn’t have much more to say about videogame music than “this track is good” and “this track is very good”, the musically trained brothers in the podcast usually have something interesting to say about the music they play.
I’ve always loved underwater levels. Both because of the ambience, and because it’s fun to switch up the gameplay once in a while.
The haters can sit back on shore and grumble, while the rest of us frolic around beneath the waves.
A great selection of games in the article too. I especially appreciate the inclusion of the Water Temple and Labyrinth Zone. A couple of games not mentioned that I’m not 100% sure are available at Swirch, though they were on the old Virtual Console service, is Adventure Island 2 and 3 for the NES. These have enjoyable and fairly easy underwater levels which has a nice ambience because of the music. The games themselves are very well made platformers which I like a lot, but aren’t as outstanding and unique as some of the top games in the genre. They also have nice ports for the original game boy.
When it comes to underwater ambience in the 8 and 16-bit era, only Donkey Kong Country can compete with Ecco: The Tides of Time. The beautiful new-age like FM synthesizer music and the perfect dolphin control, gives you an underwater experience like no other game at the time. It gets rather difficult though, so playing through the whole game is not an experience for everybody.
That sounds like another example of why original games usually are much better to play than remakes and “remasters”.
Also I disagree with Nintendo Life’s suggestion that encountering some challenges in a point and click adventure game should be met with using a guide. Getting stuck for a little while and then figuring out the puzzle is exactly what makes games like these so rewarding.
Pushing a hint system into a game that originally was designed without it is as bad as spoiling aspects of the story in my book. Puzzles and story is what makes these games and spoiling either of them is taking the fun away.
But Nintendo Life often seems to underestimate the value that challenge adds to a game and the joy of playing them as they were originally designed. I don’t know how many reviews I have read here of old games where the reviewer suggests that you should use cheats like rewind and savestates.
Differing opinions, I know. I say give puzzles a chance!
For anyone with a computer interested in these games, the original untarnished versions are supposedly both still available through Steam. Unfortunately the people who make “remasters” have an ugly tendency to want to remove the original game versions from storefronts. If they have the right to do so.
And while most so-called “remasters” aren’t as bad as these, it is often the case that you get budget artwork in high resolution substituted for high-quality artwork in low resolution. And a weird mix of old and new. The actual number of “remasters” and remakes I think are preferable to play over the original releases, fits into one hand.
As a European, I’m generally not so quick to want to see people fired as our friends overseas are. But willfully neglecting your duty in such an important job to play some game is a good argument for this fellow having to find something else to do.
And certainly much more of a fireable offense than someone making a stupid joke on social media in their free time.
A lot of people, including Nintendo Life, seems to have forgotten what an action adventure game is. It is a genre that has existed for a long time. It is a fusion of adventure (text adventures, point and click) and action games.
Like true adventure games they focus on puzzle-solving and exploration, but also gives a weighty focus to mechanics from action games.
The first one was called Adventure and was for the Atari 2600. The Legend of Zelda is another one. Both Metroid and Symphony of the Night are action adventure games. These last two are often called metroidvanias these days, and that is a subgenre of action adventure games.
Action adventures typically have an overhead view or a sidescrolling view, but action adventures in 3D also exist. Defining hat action adventures means for more modern games have become difficult. Especially because the label have been thrown around a lot by marketing people and journalists on games which aren’t action adventures at all.
But it is a real genre with its own history. People often mix together action adventures and action RPGs, which is understandable, since those two genres shares many mechanics and became very influential upon each other in the 8 and 16-bit days. But basically, if a game with action elements has RPG elements like stats, xp and levels, it is an action RPG. If it hasn’t but has puzzle solving, exploration and action elements, then it is an action adventure. At least in 2D space. Sorting out the genres for 3D games is a thornier undertaking.
I think the original versions of Final Fantasy 1-9 are still the best ones. (Some need a translation patch.)
The new Final Fantasy 7 remakes seems to be pretty cool, I'm all for making entirely new games with new things to offer that doesn't replace an older game and instead expands upon it. But all these other Final Fantasy "remasters" and remakes, which are weird mixes of old and new like chimeras doesn't stand up well to the original games.
At least not if you care about a good audiovisual experience, visual consistency, and playing the game with the original balance and mechanics.
It's sad to hear that the current version of Final Fantasy 7 on Switch uses some shoddy mix of high and low resolution artwork. Like a poorly configured emulator version. At least you should have the ability to turn on the original low res graphics so you can get visual consistency.
While the blocky characters in FF7 look somewhat weird and clumsy, the pre-rendered environment do still look awesome, just like the environment in Resident Evil 1 and 2. A lot of other games from this period also uses this technique to great effect. But they should be played with a CRT filter or on a real CRT monitor. The fifth generation games need the CRT look, much more so than the games in the previous generations.
Being able to appreciate the monochrome look of original Gameboy games is an acquired taste, which is easier to get for those who grew up with the system. I can certainly understand that many would prefer NES versions of games when they have colors, faster speed and usually a higher difficulty. In about 75% of the time, I tend to prefer the NES version of a game myself too.
But it isn’t necessarily a question of “nostalgia”, or (more correctly) a bias towards a game because you played it a long time ago. The ability to immerse yourself into a Gameboy game with no colors, in the same way as a NES game is something akin to being able to appreciate a black & white movie or a silent film. It may feel like less of an experience at first and even very strange, but if you are interested and give it a shot you may end up enjoying it and appreciating the different experience it offers.
I’m not saying videogames are high art, because they are first and foremost games. But a lot of the same patterns do seem to repeat for this newer medium as for the older ones.
Super Mario Land 1 is a great example of a game that would be stupid to remake. If you switched out all the sound, pixels and finer details of the game, there wouldn’t be much left from the original that made it stand out any longer. It would just be another Mario game. And a very short one. Sure it has catchy tunes, but I bet that if remade in higher fidelity, they wouldn’t be as enjoyable and unique as the original ones are.
A lot of what makes this game stand out are the details of its execution, and those would be lost and likely replaced with more generic ones in a remake.
I actually prefer the first Super Mario Land to the second one, but they are both good games.
Yeah, I can definitely understand that it was a cool upgrade for the time. Both for the freedom to experiment with palettes and also because first, there's "no color", and then there are.
But I don't like that showing these games with four-color palettes has become the standard way of displaying imagery from the games. I don't think it does the artwork justice.
Nice to see that the screenshots for original game boy games here mostly uses stylish monochrome instead of those garish four color palettes, that you so often see when original Gameboy games are featured.
While I’m sure that some found it exiting to actually get more than one color on the old Gameboy games when they got their Super Gameboy or Gameboy Color, these garish colors doesn’t hold up well compared to the more subdued shades of green or grey that these games were originally designed for.
Maybe this remake will also be released for the next Switch or perhaps it will be backwards compatible with the games of this generation. For games that have framerate problems with current tech, I would definitely wait for the next system to play them.
I'm generally not a fan of remakes or remasters, but I have to say that this game looks nice.
I also didn't like the "paper look" in some Genesis and NES titles on the 3DS when you put it into 3D mode, but for games that was designed for it like this one, it looks very stylish.
Underrated or not, Super Mario Land is still one of the best games in the series for me.
Compared to SMB3 and Super Mario World, it is a very short and easy game. And that is true even when compared with SMB1. But as a reinterpretation of the original Super Mario Bros for a more limited system, it works really well and does a great job of making the experience feel familiar, yet new and exiting.
I really like the stylished down-scaled visuals, which utilize the low resolution well and wish that more gameboy games used a similar approach. The first Batman game by Sunsoft is another game that did this.
And the sound design and music in this game is excellent. The sound that comes when you shoot the sphinxes is very memorable and quite similar to the sound the gameboy makes when you knock down four lines in Tetris.
I think it was a good idea to have remakes and remasters as their own entries. I hope more lists will use this approach. Too often it is automatically assumed that a newer version is better if it doesn't screw things up, which I don't agree with. And the fact that the original games in many cases were voted above the remakes/remasters here, seems to suggest that it is not an uncommon opinion.
"Also Link's Awakening DX being below the original doesn't make any sense."
I disagree on that. The garish colors in the DX version makes it much less enjoyable to me. And the fact that you get some overpowered items in the end doesn't help its case either. The original is "the definitive" version.
You seem to assume that colors automatically makes something better, but that isn't necessarily the case. Just think about black and white photographs and movies, which while they were a product of the technical limitations of their time, evolved to become a style that is still appreciated by many, despite those limitations not existing anymore.
The fact that the original Link's Awakening was voted above the DX version here should serve as a proof for you that what is the "definitive version" is something which people have differing opinions about.
I really appreciate that this list included all the original versions of the games, instead of automatically assuming that chimeras of old and new are automatically better than well-crafted original games.
For a while now the idea that older styles of artwork, sound and mechanics are without value and better thrown in the garbage can, as long as they can be replaced with what is currently in vouge, has been the most popular line of thought. But I think this is about to change and that as the medium of videogames gains more respect and status, the respect for the finer details and history of it will improve as well. Like what has happened with other mediums.
Very interesting with a list where the remakes and remasters was included as separate entries and allowed the original versions of the game to go up against them. Too often the people who makes these kinds of lists assume that throwing old visuals, sound and game mechanics in the bin and replacing them with what’s currently in vogue, automatically makes a game better.
I’m also very happy to see the original version of Link’s Awakening rank so high and above the remake and DX version. While both of those are good as well, the original game in monochrome looks much better than the DX version with its garish colors. The fact that it also adds some overpowered items in the end, doesn’t help it's case either.
The later remake is cool, but it changes the feeling of the game a lot.
The ability to appreciate the visuals of original Gameboy games is probably an acquired taste for those who didn’t play the system when it was new. But if you can appreciate the stylished pixel look of NES games and also the look of black and white movies, it is in many ways like a mix of those two. For people not playing on original hardware, using Retroarch with one of the filters makes it look almost exactly like a real Gameboy. And in fact even better, since you can turn of the blur, which you can’t do on the real hardware. I would recommend playing Gameboy games in monochrome and not with any of those palettes that came with the Super Gameboy or Gameboy Color, as those are extremely garish.
I know you meant “reaction-based platformer,”, but I found it a bit funny that your spellcheck changed it into “reactionary platformer”. It sounds like you think the platformer genre is some junk we should have thrown in the thrash bin long ago
If by reboot you mean reinventing the series you are correct.
If they created a new game like this with a little more characters, it wouldn’t be particularly impressive, because it would be so similar to the older game. And it would be very costly and time-consuming to produce it. Another game like this with less characters would get criticized both for its lack of content and new gameplay.
Unless they wait many years to release another instance of this series, they will have to rethink it in a major way. But there is a lot of ways they could go with this. Just the fact that Outfoxies, this series and the few copycat games that they have inspired is the only non-Street Fighter inspired lineage of fighting games that is still alive, should give an idea of the possibilities that lies ahead.
Comments 66
Re: Random: Fallout Fan Ports Original Game Onto The Nintendo 3DS
That’s cool. The original Fallout is still one of my favorite games and close to how I envision an “ideal RPG” to be. (An ideal RPG is of course a stupid concept as this genre has so many different types of games to offer. My favorite RPG of all time for example, Might and Magic 6, has a completely different focus than this game.)
But having a really well fleshed out world and setting as is the case here, and then having a character system and game mechanics that allows you to solve all or most quests in a number of different ways is a really great way to make an RPG. And close to the spirit of the original pen and paper games.
Fallout especially deserves credit for all the non-violent ways you can solve a task and for the bleak post-apocalyptic setting, where in a number of cases where there are no good choices, but only bad ones and you have to chose the one that your character most likely would have picked.
This is a wonderful game that really stand the test of time.
Re: 'Tales Of Kenzara: Zau' Director Addresses "Constant Targeted Harassment"
More diversity in games is by and large a very good thing. Like with many things, there also exists downsides to journalists and studios being eager to implement diversity that are legitimate to discuss. As long as it is done in a constructive and respectful manner. For example when historical authenticity and diversity does not align in games where historical authenticity is wanted.
This however has nothing to do with that. If people are criticizing and harassing a developer over a game in an African fantasy setting having an African protagonist because of supposed "wokeness", then that is really taking this "culture war" rubbish into a new low. I don't really know what to say about that. Touch some grass?
Re: Poll: Box Art Brawl - Duel: Dragon Quest III (NES)
@Purgatorium
Yeah I also prefer to configure modern games for personal exploration instead of having them push things on you.
I can understand how you feel about physical media. I have still kept all my PC game manuals and maps and using them instead of some digital recreation is an overall better experience. But for all those games I only own as digital copies, reading a manual on a pad comes quite close to the real thing. And feels vastly different than using some kind of spoilerific fan-made guide, which I only occasionally use to look up some specific kind of mechanics for certain games.
Re: Poll: Box Art Brawl - Duel: Dragon Quest III (NES)
@Purgatorium
The manual at least can still be found on the net in a high resolution scan, and I would assume the same is true for the map as well.
When playing old computer and console games that are new to me, I often download the manual to my pad in advance or while playing, to learn about game mechanics and in some cases to really dive into the backstory and setting of a game. To me, this is almost like having a manual in my hands. Having it on a phone is not as good I would think, but it works great for some people.
The kind of manuals and guides that some of these RPGs and action adventure games got on the NES and Mega Drive is a bit of a double-edged sword though.
On the one hand, having a lot of stuff related to a game to read about and look at in a manual is very cool. Especially when you are a young kid or just an old man really excited about a game. And most console games did get very shallow and short manuals compared to the massive tomes of lore, art, mechanics and reference material you got for many computer games.
But due to Nintendo of America and SEGA's low confidence in American console gamers ability to understand "complex" RPGs and adventures, they often spoiled many parts of a game, and in some cases the whole game, by giving away screenshot-maps and solutions to puzzles in the manual or guide that came with the western release of the game.
To this day there are still some gamers who think that these games were designed to be played with guides! As a kid you didn't have a critical view of this of course but thankfully this got some pushback at least from the more adult-oriented magazine EGM, who criticized both SEGA and Nintendo for giving away such guides with certain games.
Re: Poll: Box Art Brawl - Duel: Dragon Quest III (NES)
@KingMike
"The US artwork isn't telling me that much about what the gameplay itself I-N-C-L-U-D-E-S."
I don't think they differ that much in that respect. The only reason I know its referencing the job system is because I have played the game and recognize the character classes. But if I hadn't played the game before, I would have assumed that it was an illustration of the starting party and some of the more important NPC's in the game.
Thinking about it, I don't really think telling you what genre a game is, is the main job of the front cover. The screenshots on the back cover and any text on both sides already does a much better job of that. The main job of the front cover is to get your interest right away and also make the game look so interesting that you are tempted to buy it.
But I will say that the more I look at the North American art, the less I like it. It works really well at a glance and probably long enough to get you to hand over your cash to the clerk at the register. But if you bought the game half a day in advance of actually being able to play it or more, and you spent a lot of time reading the manual and looking at the cover art, the Japanese game has a lot more to offer in the case of this game. I voted for the NA version, but would probably vote for the Japanese version now instead.
With that said I do think western-style cover artwork fits perfectly on these 8-bit Japanese JRPGs. Japanese RPGs are very much based on ideas from both western RPGs and western fantasy art and writing. They have certainly created their own styles which are also very recognizable and different from the ones in the west. But when they try to invoke a "medieval" fantasy setting in their games, they draw upon many of the same tropes as a western game with the same setting.
People who mostly just like Japanese roleplaying games may feel that westernizing a game somewhat by giving it a more western cover is making it more generic. But if you appreciate both styles like me, I think it makes sense to also be open to the advantages of interpreting an 8-bit game in a more western way.
When it comes to console games, I think the peak of cover art was reached on the NES. Both for American, European and Japanese releases. Later consoles have also had a lot of good artwork, but I feel like it has been a slow but steady decline since then. That may just be the bias of me looking at those covers with childlike wonder back in the day, but I really appreciate the wall of difference between what the artwork was portraying in these 8-bit games, and what the NES and other similar machines actually could give you on screen.
Being able to use your imagination is a wonderful thing.
Re: Poll: Box Art Brawl - Duel: Dragon Quest III (NES)
With that said I do really like what Toriyama is trying to do there with the castle and the landscape at the bottom. In my opinion a lot of the best fantasy artwork for any medium concentrates on evocative landscapes that gives you a view into another world and builds up the illusion that this world exists.
Two of my favorite scenes from videogames are from the early Final Fantasy games where you see a vast landscape and a castle in the back or foreground:
https://imgur.com/a/Nl6DYTP
https://imgur.com/a/sLY9NKq
And on a similar tangent, in the metal world there are a lot of bands with fantasy lyrics and a fantasy image that has very cheesy and run-of-the-mill cover art. Sometimes cheesy is also good and enjoyable, but when in comes to metal covers with fantasy themes I always found the Austrian band Summoning to have the best and most tasteful covers. Almost all of them are focused on landscapes, often with a fortress of some sort as well:
https://imgur.com/a/cAYFwtR
https://imgur.com/a/w85hGbz
https://imgur.com/a/WT82xtv
https://imgur.com/a/Bs71YRU
https://imgur.com/a/dpufz67
https://imgur.com/a/oQraCbr
Any of these would have fit really well as the cover art for a computer RPG, and one of artworks here was actually used as the cover for an obscure Amiga/PC RPG, though it originally was commissioned for a novel.
Re: Poll: Box Art Brawl - Duel: Dragon Quest III (NES)
Akira Toriyama's art has a classic style that is very likable. But I do find the western art a little more intriguing, and I certainly would have been more intrigued by it back in the day. I go for the North American one.
Both pieces of artwork are pulled off quite well and and do a good job of getting people interested in the game and telling what kind of a game it is.But looking at them with a more critical eye there are also things to find fault with.
The idea behind the American one is a simple and good one. Having the focus on a lot of shiny weapons and some kind of mystical artifact in a way that partly feels like you have stumbled upon a great treasure. But it isn't very imaginative and while it probably wouldn't have bothered me back in the day, I'm much more a fan of realistic weapons these days over the overembellished and unrealistic ones on display here.
The Toriyama artwork seems like a great idea on paper. It has a large amount of characters, a dragon, a world map and a castle with a landscape during sunset. But while it looks nice enough, there isn't much that is really interesting about it. There are a lot of other Japanese covers in this style with a much better composition.
Re: Talking Point: How Do You Define 'Retro'?
@OldManHermit
There seems to be a little less of that these days due to among other things, one Miyamoto's excellent electronic recreations of his own free-roaming childhood adventures.
But in my country at least (Norway), children are still allowed to roam free a lot when they are old enough to handle the traffic in their area. Whenever I read about the US or speak with Americans, I get the feeling that most Americans keep their children constantly supervised because of the mostly false media-created panic about strangers hiding on every corner.
As much as I like electronic gaming myself, it is quite melancholic to see how much time all kinds of screen devices have replaced time that kids used to spend on other things.
I feel happy that I grew up both in the "analogue age" and the "digital age" and got to experience both of them in my formative years. I also never owned any consoles myself as a kid, I only played them when visiting friends or borrowed theirs, and I am very thankful to my parents for that in retrospect, which both led me to read a lot and play and explore a lot outside..
Re: Talking Point: How Do You Define 'Retro'?
@-wc-
The way I feel about it is that media and culture that are from 2000 and onwards are fairly recent of origin. And it terms of music and movies, only things created in the mid-60s and backwards are “old”, even though it is a bit before my time. But when discussing computer games, anything from the seventies and backwards are ancient relics that are inherently impressive, no matter their actual quality.
Re: Talking Point: How Do You Define 'Retro'?
@kkslider5552000
Yeah, I thought something similar when I read this subject. “Retro” is a word that signifies that something is not current, that it is a little cool for people into it and that it has a style or form that deviates somewhat from what is contemporary.
So if gaming keep changing at the slow rate it currently has for the last twenty years, then the word “retro” may change its meaning a little to just mean older and not different when the topic is gaming. That isn’t very strange as different words have different meanings in different contexts. Or perhaps another word suddenly takes off and replaces “retrogaming”.
Re: Talking Point: How Do You Define 'Retro'?
Different retro communities and people seem to have different ideas about what “retro” means. And I have no problem with that. If something of a certain age is unwanted to discuss at some place, there is certainly a lot of other places to discuss it. And bending the rules a little is usually not a problem either. I frequent a lot of different retro-communities and I do have strong opinions on a lot of things, including silly ones like how you define genres. But what is called retro or not isn’t something I think much about.
In general I think in terms of console generations, not whether a system is retro or not. For PC games it is more fluid.
Re: Rumour: Leaker Hints At New Nintendo Codenames, Persona 6 On 'Switch 2', And More
@sunspotty
“ of course, it could also just be that nintendo have moved on to english kings names for all the zeldas “
I’m looking forward to Æthelred the Unready, Longshanks and Harold Harefoot down the line.
Re: Soapbox: The Erdrick Trilogy Is The Right 'Dragon Quest' For The HD-2D Treatment
About Dragon Warrior 2 on the NES, I think its difficulty and supposed lack of balance is highly exaggerated..
When I played through it (blind) I was actually happy that there was a JRPG where there was a little pushback and you actually had to think a little about how you spent your resources. In many games in this genre you are offered a lot of tools, but the difficulty is so low that you can get through the game by using the same commands 98% of the time. Dragon Warrior 2 required you to actually think about things and I liked that.
There was a clear difficulty spike with The Road to Rhone, Rhone and the final tower, but it all seemed very well thought through and balanced to me. With for example the monsters that can eradicate your whole party only existing on a small strip of land right after the last save point, so if they killed you, you only lost a few minutes of play time at most.
In total I only died 10 times when playing the game. Compare that to most action games on the NES and that is a really small number. Even in the easier action games on the system, I died a lot more times before I beat them.
I’ve seen some claims about there being a party imbalance in Dragon Warrior 2. But this seems to be people not being able to utilize the two spellcasting members of the party very well. If you experiment with the spells they have, you will find that several of them are very useful. Or perhaps this idea of imbalance comes from the idea that all party members should do an equal amount of damage. But this kind of thinking about game balance only makes for boring and generic games. I’ve always preferred asymmetric balance, both in strategy games and RPGs. Modern thinking about multiplayer balance in single player games makes them less interesting then they have to be.
I’ve also seen some people claim that this is a game that requires a lot of grinding, but unlike Dragon Warrior 1 that wasn’t my experience. When I played through it I only grinded at three spots, and only on one of them did I spend much time on doing it. Meanwhile when I played through Dragon Warrior 1, at least 33% of my playtime was spent on grinding.
Of course if you have already played through the game before, and especially if you remember it well, there will be some grinding. Because the game balance in all these games is based upon you having to explore the game world and not immediately knowing where you have to go. And likewise if you ruin a game for yourself by using a guide there will of course be a ton of grinding. But then you only have yourself to blame.
Re: New Rumours About Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake Surface
Yeah, the NES, game boy color and some of the SNES soundtracks sounds great, but a lot of what has come after that, hasn’t been of very good quality soundwise. Apart from the orchestral soundtracks. The quality of the compositions is a very different thing, they’ve been excellent in all the games in this series that I have played.
Re: New Rumours About Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake Surface
I wonder who they will use as a composer in the next entry in the series though. Sugiyama didn’t finish his career on his highest note, but he has a really impressive legacy that probably feels quite imposing for whoever gets the job of being his successor.
Re: New Rumours About Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake Surface
The original NES game and the surprisingly good SNES remake is more than enough for me. I don’t need a modern visual style or a “budget orchestra” (ala the Final Fantasy Pixel Remasters) in this classic.
Re: What Is EGGCONSOLE? - Full Game List, PC-88, MSX2 On Nintendo Switch, Best Games To Start
@nocdaes
It’s most likely a question of economics, not of “laziness”. When you are selling a product you both want to cover all your costs and make a profit from it. These games are selling for a very low price. I doubt that it would be easy to still make a profit if they also had to translate them. That requires both people with technical skills, language skills and full pay for all of them.
Of course the people who sell these games could sell them for a higher price, which would cover the translation costs. But my impression is that most gamers aren’t willing to pay higher prices for games as old as these. Unless the original graphics and sound have been replaced with a crappier and more modern interpretation.
So sadly it seems like trying to sell old Japanese games like these in a legitimate way, will always lose out to fan-translation projects which are offered for free.
Re: Every Nintendo Switch Online Game Boy (Color) Game Ranked
The original Link’s Awakening in monochrome is still the definitive version of that game. A lot of the colors in the DX version are garish and unpleasant, like in many re-colored game boy original games. Adding an overpowered item late in the game was also not a great idea. But that does of course not mean that the DX version is bad, in most ways it is still an excellent game.
The later remake is also very cool, but the major change in esthetics makes it into a different game altogether.
Re: Rumour: Zelda LEGO Is Supposedly Coming This September
Back in the day when there were only a few themes to Lego sets, like space, pirate and knights, I would have been very surprised to see a Zelda Lego set.
These days I’m not, it makes perfect sense to squeeze a little extra money out of a target group by combining two properties with strong nostalgic value like this. I’m glad I’m not a collector.
Re: Chilled Adventure Game 'Overmorrow' Deletes Your Save Data Every 30 Days
From this description it sounds like there will be clear progress made even though the savegame is lost. Either through you knowing more about the game world, through other mechanisms or both. Not telling too much is a good idea if you want players to enjoy the game’s mysteries.
I also thinks this art style looks a lot more interesting than the typical indie quasi-retro pixel style.
Re: Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition Estimated Switch File Size Revealed
I think it’s cool they are doing something fresh and new with old NES games. It is one of their most popular and cherished consoles that a lot of us keeps returning to over and over again.
Maybe it’s not quite as fresh and new as when they released the first NES Remix, but it is still Nintendo doing something new with their old games and that is interesting to many people.
Sure, you can find much more value for no money by digging into community-created content based on their old games by using romhacks and Retro Achievements, but this is content that is made by Nintendo themself and that still counts for something.
Re: Best Underwater Levels On Nintendo Switch
@Sisilly_G
“ In hindsight, I'm also really disappointed that the Gen III Pokémon games hadn't done more with the diving/deep sea concept. It's crazy to think that there was a grand total of TWO deep sea Pokémon that were catchable in the wild ”
It’s a good thing though that there were no deep sea Pokémon in Pokémon Go.
Re: Best Underwater Levels On Nintendo Switch
Also for underwater videogame music, this a good episode of the excellent Marcato Bros podcast:
http://www.supermarcatobros.com/podcast/2016/4/17/episode-212-under-the-sea
Unlike most people who doesn’t have much more to say about videogame music than “this track is good” and “this track is very good”, the musically trained brothers in the podcast usually have something interesting to say about the music they play.
Re: Best Underwater Levels On Nintendo Switch
I’ve always loved underwater levels. Both because of the ambience, and because it’s fun to switch up the gameplay once in a while.
The haters can sit back on shore and grumble, while the rest of us frolic around beneath the waves.
A great selection of games in the article too. I especially appreciate the inclusion of the Water Temple and Labyrinth Zone. A couple of games not mentioned that I’m not 100% sure are available at Swirch, though they were on the old Virtual Console service, is Adventure Island 2 and 3 for the NES. These have enjoyable and fairly easy underwater levels which has a nice ambience because of the music. The games themselves are very well made platformers which I like a lot, but aren’t as outstanding and unique as some of the top games in the genre. They also have nice ports for the original game boy.
When it comes to underwater ambience in the 8 and 16-bit era, only Donkey Kong Country can compete with Ecco: The Tides of Time. The beautiful new-age like FM synthesizer music and the perfect dolphin control, gives you an underwater experience like no other game at the time. It gets rather difficult though, so playing through the whole game is not an experience for everybody.
Re: Review: Another Code: Recollection (Switch) - A Welcome Return For A Pair Of Cult Classics
@TheFox
That sounds like another example of why original games usually are much better to play than remakes and “remasters”.
Also I disagree with Nintendo Life’s suggestion that encountering some challenges in a point and click adventure game should be met with using a guide. Getting stuck for a little while and then figuring out the puzzle is exactly what makes games like these so rewarding.
Pushing a hint system into a game that originally was designed without it is as bad as spoiling aspects of the story in my book. Puzzles and story is what makes these games and spoiling either of them is taking the fun away.
But Nintendo Life often seems to underestimate the value that challenge adds to a game and the joy of playing them as they were originally designed. I don’t know how many reviews I have read here of old games where the reviewer suggests that you should use cheats like rewind and savestates.
Differing opinions, I know. I say give puzzles a chance!
Re: Review: Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection (Switch) - Riddled With Issues, This Is
Aspyr is famous for shoddy work.
For anyone with a computer interested in these games, the original untarnished versions are supposedly both still available through Steam. Unfortunately the people who make “remasters” have an ugly tendency to want to remove the original game versions from storefronts. If they have the right to do so.
And while most so-called “remasters” aren’t as bad as these, it is often the case that you get budget artwork in high resolution substituted for high-quality artwork in low resolution. And a weird mix of old and new. The actual number of “remasters” and remakes I think are preferable to play over the original releases, fits into one hand.
Re: Review: South Park: Snow Day! (Switch) - Glitchy, Clunky Co-op That Should've Stayed Indoors
A South Park game with “some occasional funny moments” sounds like a huge failure.
“Snow Day is structured like a live-service game”
This sounds sinister as well, although I don’t know what it means, since I never have played any live-service games.
Re: Random: Japanese Police Officer Gets Slapped Wrist For Playing Switch On Duty
@HistoricKombat
As a European, I’m generally not so quick to want to see people fired as our friends overseas are. But willfully neglecting your duty in such an important job to play some game is a good argument for this fellow having to find something else to do.
And certainly much more of a fireable offense than someone making a stupid joke on social media in their free time.
Re: Random: Japanese Police Officer Gets Slapped Wrist For Playing Switch On Duty
You shouldn’t play games while on work and certainly not when you are a police offficer.
Re: Poll: What Review Score Would You Give 'Princess Peach: Showtime!'?
A lot of people, including Nintendo Life, seems to have forgotten what an action adventure game is. It is a genre that has existed for a long time. It is a fusion of adventure (text adventures, point and click) and action games.
Like true adventure games they focus on puzzle-solving and exploration, but also gives a weighty focus to mechanics from action games.
The first one was called Adventure and was for the Atari 2600. The Legend of Zelda is another one. Both Metroid and Symphony of the Night are action adventure games. These last two are often called metroidvanias these days, and that is a subgenre of action adventure games.
Action adventures typically have an overhead view or a sidescrolling view, but action adventures in 3D also exist. Defining hat action adventures means for more modern games have become difficult. Especially because the label have been thrown around a lot by marketing people and journalists on games which aren’t action adventures at all.
But it is a real genre with its own history. People often mix together action adventures and action RPGs, which is understandable, since those two genres shares many mechanics and became very influential upon each other in the 8 and 16-bit days. But basically, if a game with action elements has RPG elements like stats, xp and levels, it is an action RPG. If it hasn’t but has puzzle solving, exploration and action elements, then it is an action adventure. At least in 2D space. Sorting out the genres for 3D games is a thornier undertaking.
Re: Save Up To 70% On Square Enix Titles In The Publisher's Latest Switch eShop Sale
I think the original versions of Final Fantasy 1-9 are still the best ones. (Some need a translation patch.)
The new Final Fantasy 7 remakes seems to be pretty cool, I'm all for making entirely new games with new things to offer that doesn't replace an older game and instead expands upon it. But all these other Final Fantasy "remasters" and remakes, which are weird mixes of old and new like chimeras doesn't stand up well to the original games.
At least not if you care about a good audiovisual experience, visual consistency, and playing the game with the original balance and mechanics.
It's sad to hear that the current version of Final Fantasy 7 on Switch uses some shoddy mix of high and low resolution artwork. Like a poorly configured emulator version. At least you should have the ability to turn on the original low res graphics so you can get visual consistency.
While the blocky characters in FF7 look somewhat weird and clumsy, the pre-rendered environment do still look awesome, just like the environment in Resident Evil 1 and 2. A lot of other games from this period also uses this technique to great effect. But they should be played with a CRT filter or on a real CRT monitor. The fifth generation games need the CRT look, much more so than the games in the previous generations.
Re: Nintendo Expands Switch Online's Game Boy & GBC Library With Three More Mario Titles
@Stuffgamer1
Being able to appreciate the monochrome look of original Gameboy games is an acquired taste, which is easier to get for those who grew up with the system. I can certainly understand that many would prefer NES versions of games when they have colors, faster speed and usually a higher difficulty. In about 75% of the time, I tend to prefer the NES version of a game myself too.
But it isn’t necessarily a question of “nostalgia”, or (more correctly) a bias towards a game because you played it a long time ago. The ability to immerse yourself into a Gameboy game with no colors, in the same way as a NES game is something akin to being able to appreciate a black & white movie or a silent film. It may feel like less of an experience at first and even very strange, but if you are interested and give it a shot you may end up enjoying it and appreciating the different experience it offers.
I’m not saying videogames are high art, because they are first and foremost games. But a lot of the same patterns do seem to repeat for this newer medium as for the older ones.
Re: Nintendo Expands Switch Online's Game Boy & GBC Library With Three More Mario Titles
Super Mario Land 1 is a great example of a game that would be stupid to remake. If you switched out all the sound, pixels and finer details of the game, there wouldn’t be much left from the original that made it stand out any longer. It would just be another Mario game. And a very short one. Sure it has catchy tunes, but I bet that if remade in higher fidelity, they wouldn’t be as enjoyable and unique as the original ones are.
A lot of what makes this game stand out are the details of its execution, and those would be lost and likely replaced with more generic ones in a remake.
I actually prefer the first Super Mario Land to the second one, but they are both good games.
Re: Creators Of New Switch Emulator 'Suyu' Hope To Avoid Nintendo's Wrath
@Rozetta
I guess they're gonna end up in Shuntaro Furukawa's minka then.
Re: Every Nintendo Switch Online Game Boy (Color) Game Ranked
@-wc-
Yeah, I can definitely understand that it was a cool upgrade for the time. Both for the freedom to experiment with palettes and also because first, there's "no color", and then there are.
But I don't like that showing these games with four-color palettes has become the standard way of displaying imagery from the games. I don't think it does the artwork justice.
Re: Creators Of New Switch Emulator 'Suyu' Hope To Avoid Nintendo's Wrath
They better tread carefully, or they’ll end up in Doug Bowser’s castle.
Re: Game Boy Emulator Developer Permanently Removes App From Google Play Store
@Not_Soos
They would end up in Doug Bowser’s castle for sure.
Re: Every Nintendo Switch Online Game Boy (Color) Game Ranked
Nice to see that the screenshots for original game boy games here mostly uses stylish monochrome instead of those garish four color palettes, that you so often see when original Gameboy games are featured.
While I’m sure that some found it exiting to actually get more than one color on the old Gameboy games when they got their Super Gameboy or Gameboy Color, these garish colors doesn’t hold up well compared to the more subdued shades of green or grey that these games were originally designed for.
Re: Nintendo Reveals Box Art And New Screens For Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door On Switch
@Mgalens
That is a good point. If it is a locked framerate issue, one can't take for granted that it will be resolved.
Re: Nintendo Reveals Box Art And New Screens For Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door On Switch
Removed
Re: Nintendo Reveals Box Art And New Screens For Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door On Switch
@Sonicka
Maybe this remake will also be released for the next Switch or perhaps it will be backwards compatible with the games of this generation. For games that have framerate problems with current tech, I would definitely wait for the next system to play them.
Re: Nintendo Reveals Box Art And New Screens For Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door On Switch
I'm generally not a fan of remakes or remasters, but I have to say that this game looks nice.
I also didn't like the "paper look" in some Genesis and NES titles on the 3DS when you put it into 3D mode, but for games that was designed for it like this one, it looks very stylish.
Re: Review: Snufkin: Melody Of Moominvalley (Switch) - A Joyful, Dreamlike Adventure With An Edge
This game seems to be very nice. It has gotten some good reviews elsewhere too. I approve of its environmentalist message.
Re: Feature: Is Any Mario Game Genuinely 'Underrated'? - 10 Super Mario Games To Reconsider
Underrated or not, Super Mario Land is still one of the best games in the series for me.
Compared to SMB3 and Super Mario World, it is a very short and easy game. And that is true even when compared with SMB1. But as a reinterpretation of the original Super Mario Bros for a more limited system, it works really well and does a great job of making the experience feel familiar, yet new and exiting.
I really like the stylished down-scaled visuals, which utilize the low resolution well and wish that more gameboy games used a similar approach. The first Batman game by Sunsoft is another game that did this.
And the sound design and music in this game is excellent. The sound that comes when you shoot the sphinxes is very memorable and quite similar to the sound the gameboy makes when you knock down four lines in Tetris.
Re: Best Zelda Games Of All Time
@XCWarrior
I think it was a good idea to have remakes and remasters as their own entries. I hope more lists will use this approach. Too often it is automatically assumed that a newer version is better if it doesn't screw things up, which I don't agree with. And the fact that the original games in many cases were voted above the remakes/remasters here, seems to suggest that it is not an uncommon opinion.
Re: Best Zelda Games Of All Time
@FlyingDunsparce
"Also Link's Awakening DX being below the original doesn't make any sense."
I disagree on that. The garish colors in the DX version makes it much less enjoyable to me. And the fact that you get some overpowered items in the end doesn't help its case either. The original is "the definitive" version.
You seem to assume that colors automatically makes something better, but that isn't necessarily the case. Just think about black and white photographs and movies, which while they were a product of the technical limitations of their time, evolved to become a style that is still appreciated by many, despite those limitations not existing anymore.
The fact that the original Link's Awakening was voted above the DX version here should serve as a proof for you that what is the "definitive version" is something which people have differing opinions about.
I really appreciate that this list included all the original versions of the games, instead of automatically assuming that chimeras of old and new are automatically better than well-crafted original games.
For a while now the idea that older styles of artwork, sound and mechanics are without value and better thrown in the garbage can, as long as they can be replaced with what is currently in vouge, has been the most popular line of thought. But I think this is about to change and that as the medium of videogames gains more respect and status, the respect for the finer details and history of it will improve as well. Like what has happened with other mediums.
Re: Best Zelda Games Of All Time
Very interesting with a list where the remakes and remasters was included as separate entries and allowed the original versions of the game to go up against them. Too often the people who makes these kinds of lists assume that throwing old visuals, sound and game mechanics in the bin and replacing them with what’s currently in vogue, automatically makes a game better.
I’m also very happy to see the original version of Link’s Awakening rank so high and above the remake and DX version. While both of those are good as well, the original game in monochrome looks much better than the DX version with its garish colors. The fact that it also adds some overpowered items in the end, doesn’t help it's case either.
The later remake is cool, but it changes the feeling of the game a lot.
The ability to appreciate the visuals of original Gameboy games is probably an acquired taste for those who didn’t play the system when it was new. But if you can appreciate the stylished pixel look of NES games and also the look of black and white movies, it is in many ways like a mix of those two. For people not playing on original hardware, using Retroarch with one of the filters makes it look almost exactly like a real Gameboy. And in fact even better, since you can turn of the blur, which you can’t do on the real hardware. I would recommend playing Gameboy games in monochrome and not with any of those palettes that came with the Super Gameboy or Gameboy Color, as those are extremely garish.
Re: Review: Penny's Big Breakaway (Switch) - A Furiously Fast & Fun Platformer With Sega Spirit
@Sonicka
I know you meant “reaction-based platformer,”, but I found it a bit funny that your spellcheck changed it into “reactionary platformer”. It sounds like you think the platformer genre is some junk we should have thrown in the thrash bin long ago
Re: Talking Point: What Are You Playing This Weekend? (February 17th)
Ocarina of Time. First time, enjoying it so far.
Re: Sakurai Acknowledges End Of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate Development
@Martijn87
If by reboot you mean reinventing the series you are correct.
If they created a new game like this with a little more characters, it wouldn’t be particularly impressive, because it would be so similar to the older game. And it would be very costly and time-consuming to produce it. Another game like this with less characters would get criticized both for its lack of content and new gameplay.
Unless they wait many years to release another instance of this series, they will have to rethink it in a major way. But there is a lot of ways they could go with this. Just the fact that Outfoxies, this series and the few copycat games that they have inspired is the only non-Street Fighter inspired lineage of fighting games that is still alive, should give an idea of the possibilities that lies ahead.