I don’t know who Shadow is but it looks like Sonic have skinned him and made a suit. A bit morbid, but not worse than Donald Duck and his nephews having turkey for their thanksgiving dinner.
The music is great and the use of cinematics too. Back when the game was new the use of cinematics in it was really mind-bending and I remember having lots of ideas in the wake of playing it about creating my own game inspired by this one and the movie Aliens. The concept that the game story could change depending on which characters lived and died gave me the idea to really expand upon this.
While the cinematics in themselves aren't as impressive in the same way these days, I think they are still done very well in what they focus on, how it interacts with the actual game and the cut-scenes themself not being overly long either. The story is an important aspect of the game, but it doesn't take over exploring the game world, interacting with it and solving it.
There's also very few annoying aspect in the game. The tank controls can be a little annoying at first when you haven't played with them in a while, but at least for me, this quickly went away. Frankly I think a lot of people who plays games these days are really lazy about trying to learn new game mechanics. The bosses aren't that well designed mechanically, I found the easiest approach for some of them like the snake, was just to stand still, blast them and heal myself. But I think the main point of these bosses wasn't to have really awesome and cool bossfights, but to have more powerful creatures in the game which you should fear and would want to find a way to kill off as soon as possible.
Let the naysayers nay all they want, this game is awesome.
But now I wonder how much the designers have borrowed from the french game Alone in the Dark, which shares several ideas with this one. I have it on GOG, but haven't played it yet. It's something I have to do at one point. And there's also Capcom's old RPG "Sweet Home" for the NES, which reputedly inspired this game as well.
I mostly agree about your first two paragraphs. I'd like to add that I have been revisiting some old playstation games recently and also playing some I never played before, and I think they hold up really well. Even better than those on the Nintendo 64, though there are some fun ones there too.
It used to be that what I saw of emulation of both Playstation games and original game boy games on PCs didn't make the games look as good as I remembered them. For the Playstation because of the effect that CRT television had on the visuals in smoothing it out and giving it "fake detail". With the Gameboy, it was the lack of that special "LCD-calculator" look and how big those pixels looked when they were stretched all over a PC monitor.
But these days with Retroarch I have CRT and dot matrix filters that make these games look exactly as good as I remember them. For someone like me who care a lot about esthetics in games it matters a great deal and I definitely prefer this approach to watered down remakes and remasters.
I played through Resident Evil 1 when it was released but only a little of the sequel. When I revisited these games recently, both were genuinely scary at times, and the atmosphere is really wonderful.
I am also really impressed by how great the design in Resident Evil 1 actually was. Especially when you take into account that it was a pretty early 3D game, and the fact that they did so many things right on their first shot gave me huge respect for the developers.
The only thing I find fault with is the the hilarious voice-acting, which is so bad that it is really entertaining, but thankfully this doesn't get in the way of the atmosphere in the game outside of the cut-scenes. And the story, which in itself is kind of silly and doesn't make much sense. But even though it is silly, the story does still work very well with the game.
But again there are so many brilliant things about how the game is designed. All the weird camera angles works brilliantly to create suspense and make the player wonder about what is going to happen. They also makes both this game and the sequel very esthetically pleasing. I also love the old first person shooter Blood, which was released in 1997 for home computers, and while that game also has a great atmosphere, it is never as scary as Resident Evil, and one of the important reasons for that is because of the fixed and sometimes disconcerting camera angles in this game. I bet some of the designers must have been fans of classic cinema.
The limited amount of savepoints was also brilliant, and likewise the limited amount of ammo. You never run out of savepoints, or at least I didn't when I played the game now, but just the fact that it is noticeably limited makes a big difference.
Yeah so-called "nostalgia" is a word that is often used by people who are under the delusion that their personal preferences towards mechanics and esthetics are objective ones shared by most people. Or that what is currently popular reflects quality in an objective way.
Is it so hard to imagine that people just have different preferences than your own? Why chalk it up to "nostalgia" when you don't know us. It is actually rather rude.
Also, nostalgia is a very specific type of feeling. Most of the time when the word is used in gaming discussions it is misused. The words you probably are looking for are "having an established connection" towards something or "having a bias" towards something.
Ascribing someones fondness for fixed camera angles or tank controls to "nostalgia googles" is almost as ridiculous as ascribing someones fondness for heavy metal or hockey to the same thing. Sure, what we encounter in formative phases of life like childhood, teenage years and young adulthood, tend to influence our preferences more than things we encounter later. But for the most part this has little to do with actual nostalgia.
Nostalgia is a fleeting emotion that may compel someone to seek out something they have good memories from in an earlier part of their life. But if that person actually sticks with this thing they left long ago, then there must be other aspects about it that upholds their interest.
A very nice game that was not included on this list, which is understandable since it is rather obscure, is the shoot ‘em up called Buraifighter Deluxe.
It has a very nice soundtrack and pretty nice visuals, though of the kind where you have to use a bit of imagination on some of the normal enemies. But many shoot ‘em ups have nice soundtracks and visuals. What makes it stand out is the control method where when you hold the shooting button down, you move without aiming, but if you let go of the shooting button, you aim in the direction you are moving.
This works really well, and while a lot of shooters have utilized different methods for aiming in different directions, not many have pulled it off so well as this game. As it allows you to aim exactly where you want effortlessly, with just a small delay and without interrupting movement. The game is designed for this from the ground up too, with enemies coming from various directions and the direction of the auto scrolling changing throughout a stage. Sometimes also because of certain pickups.
The difficulty of the game is actually a very low one, on the first difficulty setting. Which some shoot ‘em up fans probably will appreciate, since a lot of these games on other platforms tend to be really hard. There are three other difficulty settings which increases the challenge, though it doesn’t ever go up to the level of harder shoot ‘em ups on the 16-bit systems.
The Gameboy doesn’t have the processor or resolution to handle the requirements of really hard shoot ‘em ups well, so the developers instead made a game with easy to medium difficulty that was well-tailored to the system.
Very nice to see that the journalist had the good sense to avoid those atrociously garish Super Gameboy and Gameboy Color palettes that are so often used when taking screenshots for this great system.
I guess that if you owned a Super Gameboy back then, having a Gameboy with actual colors (!) was so awesome that the impression is still burned into your mind.
But if it is one type of game graphics that does not hold up well in retrospect, it is those four-color palettes that was just haphazardly added to games. Even 80s PC games running in CGA-mode does not look as garish as this.
If you instead use a black and white output as here, or my personal favorite, four shades of green with crunchy big calculator pixels, then the old Gameboy games get a beautiful artistic look, which is a mix of black & white cinema and 8-bit style pixel art. Here’s hoping this becomes the standard way of showing original Gameboy games.
The definitive version of Link’s Awakening is still the monochrome original. It is very well designed, very atmospheric and just perfect in every way.
The remake and the game boy color port are nice too, but I will always recommend the original one over those, due to the garish colors and overpowered items available in the GBC port and the fact that the remake is an entirely different game.
It is entirely possible to enjoy games like these without any nostalgic connection towards them. You just have to be open to game mechanics and controls which are a bit different from the standard today. And able to use your imagination when viewing the visuals. For some of us that is a “skill” that we never lost.
People who love to throw around the word “nostalgia” in gaming discussions, often have a very exaggerated sense of how much of a game’s quality is decided by objective factors.
When it comes to both game mechanics and esthetics, most of what decides if a game has a high quality or not are actually subjective factors. But people often mistake what is currently popular or high-status opinions as objective facts.
For example in RPGs I personally think that having a lot of possibilities and deep and complex systems is generally a good thing, while other people doesn’t like this at all and prefers a streamlined and standardized experience.
Or when it comes to visuals, I have always found Warcraft 3 to be a horrendously ugly game, which I disliked the look of when it was new and which I still dislike when I see it today. But a lot of people seems to like this style and I have even seen the blocky mess described as “timeless”.
Diablo 1 by the same company was very visually appealing when it came out to me, and the reasons for why I have returned to it and it’s sequel over the years, are primarily their visual style and sound design. But I have also seen some people describe Diablo 2 as an “unimpressive” game visually.
Game quality is for the most part a subjective thing.
Remasters and remakes are usually very uninteresting and these look to be no different.
For me when I play old games, I want to play them the way they were designed, not as weird chimeras that both panders to what is currently in vogue and at the same tries to give you something of the original experience.
It is much more interesting to me to play a game with some warts that was awe-inspiring or genre-pushing back in the day, than a watered-down approximation of it made today.
Remakes and remasters often feature budget-graphics with a higher resolution and polycount than the original ones had. I much prefer graphics in a low resolution and polycount, where the designers really put their mind, heart and sweat into them.
And I would much rather play an original classic game with the mechanics and difficulty it originally had, than having someone trying to improve my “quality of life” by taking away fun features and interesting mechanics.
A lot of gamers today have the idea that only story, general art design, melodies and the gist of the original game mechanics have any value in a game. So as long as you keep these, a game is automatically better if the visuals, audio and game mechanics have been “updated” to reflect what is currently popular. But I find this to be a very simple-minded and barbaric way to view games. And if the trend for other cultural products is an indication, then people will increasingly come to value games as complete creations, not just skeletons of an idea.
A game always reflects the time period it was created in and the state of mind of its creators. When you take away a lot of the details and texture of this, you also take away a lot of this information, leaving you with a product that at best is incomplete, or worse, misleading. For some cultural products like paintings, this approach would have been considered to be an abomination. For others like films, there is more tolerance for it, but it is also considered problematic.
I don’t view games as an art form personally, because I consider a game to be something distinct from art. (With a few exceptions for art-focused games.) But no matter how you define them, games are cultural products and a form of expression whose importance and status has risen dramatically in the last decades. I am quite convinced that as this status continues to rise, the view that every game needs a remake will become less popular than it is now. That does of course not mean that remakes and remasters will die out completely, for there will no doubt still be a market for them, like it is with movies and series currently. But I think that far more people will be what is now disparagingly referred to as “purists”.
Back to the games in the article:
Apart from a demo of Tomb Raider 2 I never played these back in the day, but now that I am on a PS1/Saturn/N64 kick, I am looking forward to trying out the original Tomb Raider in all its glory. With a filter that gives it a suitable CRT-television look of course.
This remake is very cool looking, but the definitive version of the game is still the monochrome original. Some people like the game boy color version too, but I will always recommend the original one over that one, due to its garish colors and overpowered items available later in the game.
I played through the original NES version of this for the first time recently. Without any guides of course. I was pleasantly surprised by it and had a lot of fun.
It was not as good as DQ4 or DQ3, but I enjoyed it more than DQ1, which is charming but also a very basic game where you need to grind a lot.
Most things in this game can also be found in later more sophisticated JRPGs, but apart from the "classical" NES Dragon Quest feeling, what it has going for it is a little more challenging adventure elements, resource management and battles than in most JRPGs, and a nice lyrical translation with a lot of anachronistic expressions. At times it the dialogue almost sounded like excerpts from old English folk songs. This is again about the NES version though. I don't know if this newer version of the game still uses this same translation.
A lot of the claims made about the difficulty of the original version of the game seems to be mostly horseshit. The game isn't really difficult or unfair. It has an increased difficulty once you get to the endgame, but it is one that feels suitable and gives you a sense of higher stakes, but is not frustrating.
In total, my party lost/died ten times when playing this game. Eight of them were in the endgame, and only two of them due to random chance. Those deaths that happened due to random chance, only cost me a few minutes as well, since they can only happen right after a savepoint, something people never mention when criticizing this aspect of the game.
10 deaths in total isn't much. When I play a difficult NES or SNES action game, I die many, many times more than that before I manage to complete it.
I have concluded that the reason why games like this one and Phantasy Star 2 receives such a bad reputation is that most JRPG fans doesn't much difficulty or planning in their games. They seem to prefer to have a very relaxed experience where they mostly can just click "attack" to get through the game. I like this relaxed experience too, but it is much more fun if you actually have to think a little about the systems that are in the games.
@Falksi I agree that the selection on the Mega Drive is a lot better. But to be fair, the Mega Drive probably has the best shoot 'em up selection of any console, the only ones that can compare are the Saturn, the PlayStation and the PC Engine.
But for a modern console this is actually quite impressive.
In my opinion the old classic 16 and 8-bit shoot 'em ups from the consoles and arcades are much superior to modern shooters in the Cave style.
Bullet-hell shoot 'em ups can be fun to play once in a while, but their gimmicks gets old fast, and the atmosphere in the classic shooters are just so much better than the overtly busy soundscape and playing fields in Cave-style games, with tons of annoying pickups and flying anime-girls.
I'm not saying those games are not well designed, or that it was bad that some invention happened in the stagnant genre, but bullet-hell shooters just doesn't stand up to classics like Gradius, Gradius 2, Axelay, Bio-Hazard Battle, Thunderforce 4, Eliminate Down, Gaiares, Truxton or 1943 for me.
I think it is a good idea to make potential buyers aware that some aspects of a game could considered to be old-fashioned, or even outdated, according to popular opinion.
But one thing I take issue with, which often comes up in discussions of old games, is the strange misuse of the world "nostalgia". A lot of the people who use the word in gaming discussions do not understand its meaning, but I do expect better of a professional game reviewer.
Some people have a preference for certain game mechanics, graphics styles, music styles and sound design. Sometimes people even prefer certain styles over other styles. Regardless of whether these styles could be described as dated or not, it is a misunderstanding to describe such preferences as "nostalgia".
If we think a little more broadly outside the medium of videogames, we find that many people often have preferences for certain types of music, art styles or movie genres. Probably in a majority of the cases you will find that the genres and styles people like the most, are also genres they encountered in the formative years of childhood, teens and early adulthood.
If someone has a particular fondness for new wave music from the 80's, would you describe it as "just nostalgia"? Or someone who likes horror movies because he read a lot of horror stories as a child. Is that also "just nostalgia"?
I think it is silly, and also a little demeaning to reduce people's preferences this way, and it is also a misuse of the word itself.
Nostalgia as a concept would more properly apply, when someone is reminiscing or replaying a game, they actually played a long time ago, but when talking more generally about having preferences for a certain style, it should not be used.
Personally I like both new and old games, and enjoy a variety of aspects in both. I can definitely understand the importance and hard balancing act for modern reviewers, to not let their own preferences or the feelings of older gamers about a game, bog down a review to just become worship of something old, with no relevance for younger readers. But please, stop abusing the word "nostalgia"!
@Darkthany
That's a pretty ignorant statement to make. It's like saying the people who prefer Super Marios World over New Super Mario Bros' Wii U are only doing it for nostalgic reasons. Or that people who prefer Final Fantasy 6 over Final Fantasy 15 are just blinded by their own nostalgia. Some people throw around and misuse the word nostalgia far a lot.
What many people seem to mistake for a nostalgia is simply the fact the different people have different preferences.
There are no objective ways of measuring quality in a videogame, just differrent opinions. Sometimes some opinons are more popuar than others, but with the course of time they do change.
People should recognice that most of the time people who like different things than they do themselves just have different opinions, it has very little to do with nostalgia.
Objective truth can be found in the natural sciences, not in videogame journalism or art criticism.
By the way, I have never played Baldur's Gate. But I do think that it would appeal to my tastes.
Comments 66
Re: 77 Switch Games To Pick Up In Nintendo's 'Play On Sale' (UK)
What Remains of Edith’s Finches is one I really need to play soon. I hope it’s not too grim and explicit though, as I’ve always been fond of birds.
Re: Random: Sonic Superstars' Free Shadow Costume Is Certainly Something
I don’t know who Shadow is but it looks like Sonic have skinned him and made a suit. A bit morbid, but not worse than Donald Duck and his nephews having turkey for their thanksgiving dinner.
Re: Review: Alisa Developer's Cut (Switch) - An Excellent RE Homage That Nails The '90s Vibe
The music is great and the use of cinematics too. Back when the game was new the use of cinematics in it was really mind-bending and I remember having lots of ideas in the wake of playing it about creating my own game inspired by this one and the movie Aliens. The concept that the game story could change depending on which characters lived and died gave me the idea to really expand upon this.
While the cinematics in themselves aren't as impressive in the same way these days, I think they are still done very well in what they focus on, how it interacts with the actual game and the cut-scenes themself not being overly long either. The story is an important aspect of the game, but it doesn't take over exploring the game world, interacting with it and solving it.
There's also very few annoying aspect in the game. The tank controls can be a little annoying at first when you haven't played with them in a while, but at least for me, this quickly went away. Frankly I think a lot of people who plays games these days are really lazy about trying to learn new game mechanics. The bosses aren't that well designed mechanically, I found the easiest approach for some of them like the snake, was just to stand still, blast them and heal myself. But I think the main point of these bosses wasn't to have really awesome and cool bossfights, but to have more powerful creatures in the game which you should fear and would want to find a way to kill off as soon as possible.
Let the naysayers nay all they want, this game is awesome.
But now I wonder how much the designers have borrowed from the french game Alone in the Dark, which shares several ideas with this one. I have it on GOG, but haven't played it yet. It's something I have to do at one point. And there's also Capcom's old RPG "Sweet Home" for the NES, which reputedly inspired this game as well.
Re: Review: Alisa Developer's Cut (Switch) - An Excellent RE Homage That Nails The '90s Vibe
@WaveBoy
I mostly agree about your first two paragraphs. I'd like to add that I have been revisiting some old playstation games recently and also playing some I never played before, and I think they hold up really well. Even better than those on the Nintendo 64, though there are some fun ones there too.
It used to be that what I saw of emulation of both Playstation games and original game boy games on PCs didn't make the games look as good as I remembered them. For the Playstation because of the effect that CRT television had on the visuals in smoothing it out and giving it "fake detail". With the Gameboy, it was the lack of that special "LCD-calculator" look and how big those pixels looked when they were stretched all over a PC monitor.
But these days with Retroarch I have CRT and dot matrix filters that make these games look exactly as good as I remember them. For someone like me who care a lot about esthetics in games it matters a great deal and I definitely prefer this approach to watered down remakes and remasters.
I played through Resident Evil 1 when it was released but only a little of the sequel. When I revisited these games recently, both were genuinely scary at times, and the atmosphere is really wonderful.
I am also really impressed by how great the design in Resident Evil 1 actually was. Especially when you take into account that it was a pretty early 3D game, and the fact that they did so many things right on their first shot gave me huge respect for the developers.
The only thing I find fault with is the the hilarious voice-acting, which is so bad that it is really entertaining, but thankfully this doesn't get in the way of the atmosphere in the game outside of the cut-scenes. And the story, which in itself is kind of silly and doesn't make much sense. But even though it is silly, the story does still work very well with the game.
But again there are so many brilliant things about how the game is designed. All the weird camera angles works brilliantly to create suspense and make the player wonder about what is going to happen. They also makes both this game and the sequel very esthetically pleasing. I also love the old first person shooter Blood, which was released in 1997 for home computers, and while that game also has a great atmosphere, it is never as scary as Resident Evil, and one of the important reasons for that is because of the fixed and sometimes disconcerting camera angles in this game. I bet some of the designers must have been fans of classic cinema.
The limited amount of savepoints was also brilliant, and likewise the limited amount of ammo. You never run out of savepoints, or at least I didn't when I played the game now, but just the fact that it is noticeably limited makes a big difference.
Re: Review: Alisa Developer's Cut (Switch) - An Excellent RE Homage That Nails The '90s Vibe
@mlt
"shiny nostalgia goggles"
Yeah so-called "nostalgia" is a word that is often used by people who are under the delusion that their personal preferences towards mechanics and esthetics are objective ones shared by most people. Or that what is currently popular reflects quality in an objective way.
Is it so hard to imagine that people just have different preferences than your own? Why chalk it up to "nostalgia" when you don't know us. It is actually rather rude.
Also, nostalgia is a very specific type of feeling. Most of the time when the word is used in gaming discussions it is misused. The words you probably are looking for are "having an established connection" towards something or "having a bias" towards something.
Ascribing someones fondness for fixed camera angles or tank controls to "nostalgia googles" is almost as ridiculous as ascribing someones fondness for heavy metal or hockey to the same thing. Sure, what we encounter in formative phases of life like childhood, teenage years and young adulthood, tend to influence our preferences more than things we encounter later. But for the most part this has little to do with actual nostalgia.
Nostalgia is a fleeting emotion that may compel someone to seek out something they have good memories from in an earlier part of their life. But if that person actually sticks with this thing they left long ago, then there must be other aspects about it that upholds their interest.
Re: 50 Best Game Boy Games Of All Time
A very nice game that was not included on this list, which is understandable since it is rather obscure, is the shoot ‘em up called Buraifighter Deluxe.
It has a very nice soundtrack and pretty nice visuals, though of the kind where you have to use a bit of imagination on some of the normal enemies. But many shoot ‘em ups have nice soundtracks and visuals. What makes it stand out is the control method where when you hold the shooting button down, you move without aiming, but if you let go of the shooting button, you aim in the direction you are moving.
This works really well, and while a lot of shooters have utilized different methods for aiming in different directions, not many have pulled it off so well as this game. As it allows you to aim exactly where you want effortlessly, with just a small delay and without interrupting movement. The game is designed for this from the ground up too, with enemies coming from various directions and the direction of the auto scrolling changing throughout a stage. Sometimes also because of certain pickups.
The difficulty of the game is actually a very low one, on the first difficulty setting. Which some shoot ‘em up fans probably will appreciate, since a lot of these games on other platforms tend to be really hard. There are three other difficulty settings which increases the challenge, though it doesn’t ever go up to the level of harder shoot ‘em ups on the 16-bit systems.
The Gameboy doesn’t have the processor or resolution to handle the requirements of really hard shoot ‘em ups well, so the developers instead made a game with easy to medium difficulty that was well-tailored to the system.
Re: 50 Best Game Boy Games Of All Time
Very nice to see that the journalist had the good sense to avoid those atrociously garish Super Gameboy and Gameboy Color palettes that are so often used when taking screenshots for this great system.
I guess that if you owned a Super Gameboy back then, having a Gameboy with actual colors (!) was so awesome that the impression is still burned into your mind.
But if it is one type of game graphics that does not hold up well in retrospect, it is those four-color palettes that was just haphazardly added to games. Even 80s PC games running in CGA-mode does not look as garish as this.
If you instead use a black and white output as here, or my personal favorite, four shades of green with crunchy big calculator pixels, then the old Gameboy games get a beautiful artistic look, which is a mix of black & white cinema and 8-bit style pixel art. Here’s hoping this becomes the standard way of showing original Gameboy games.
Re: 50 Best Game Boy Color (GBC) Games Of All Time
The definitive version of Link’s Awakening is still the monochrome original. It is very well designed, very atmospheric and just perfect in every way.
The remake and the game boy color port are nice too, but I will always recommend the original one over those, due to the garish colors and overpowered items available in the GBC port and the fact that the remake is an entirely different game.
Re: Video: Tomb Raider I-III Remastered - 13 Minutes Of Direct Switch Gameplay
@GraniteFraggle
It is entirely possible to enjoy games like these without any nostalgic connection towards them. You just have to be open to game mechanics and controls which are a bit different from the standard today. And able to use your imagination when viewing the visuals. For some of us that is a “skill” that we never lost.
People who love to throw around the word “nostalgia” in gaming discussions, often have a very exaggerated sense of how much of a game’s quality is decided by objective factors.
When it comes to both game mechanics and esthetics, most of what decides if a game has a high quality or not are actually subjective factors. But people often mistake what is currently popular or high-status opinions as objective facts.
For example in RPGs I personally think that having a lot of possibilities and deep and complex systems is generally a good thing, while other people doesn’t like this at all and prefers a streamlined and standardized experience.
Or when it comes to visuals, I have always found Warcraft 3 to be a horrendously ugly game, which I disliked the look of when it was new and which I still dislike when I see it today. But a lot of people seems to like this style and I have even seen the blocky mess described as “timeless”.
Diablo 1 by the same company was very visually appealing when it came out to me, and the reasons for why I have returned to it and it’s sequel over the years, are primarily their visual style and sound design. But I have also seen some people describe Diablo 2 as an “unimpressive” game visually.
Game quality is for the most part a subjective thing.
Re: Video: Tomb Raider I-III Remastered - 13 Minutes Of Direct Switch Gameplay
Remasters and remakes are usually very uninteresting and these look to be no different.
For me when I play old games, I want to play them the way they were designed, not as weird chimeras that both panders to what is currently in vogue and at the same tries to give you something of the original experience.
It is much more interesting to me to play a game with some warts that was awe-inspiring or genre-pushing back in the day, than a watered-down approximation of it made today.
Remakes and remasters often feature budget-graphics with a higher resolution and polycount than the original ones had. I much prefer graphics in a low resolution and polycount, where the designers really put their mind, heart and sweat into them.
And I would much rather play an original classic game with the mechanics and difficulty it originally had, than having someone trying to improve my “quality of life” by taking away fun features and interesting mechanics.
A lot of gamers today have the idea that only story, general art design, melodies and the gist of the original game mechanics have any value in a game. So as long as you keep these, a game is automatically better if the visuals, audio and game mechanics have been “updated” to reflect what is currently popular. But I find this to be a very simple-minded and barbaric way to view games. And if the trend for other cultural products is an indication, then people will increasingly come to value games as complete creations, not just skeletons of an idea.
A game always reflects the time period it was created in and the state of mind of its creators. When you take away a lot of the details and texture of this, you also take away a lot of this information, leaving you with a product that at best is incomplete, or worse, misleading. For some cultural products like paintings, this approach would have been considered to be an abomination. For others like films, there is more tolerance for it, but it is also considered problematic.
I don’t view games as an art form personally, because I consider a game to be something distinct from art. (With a few exceptions for art-focused games.) But no matter how you define them, games are cultural products and a form of expression whose importance and status has risen dramatically in the last decades. I am quite convinced that as this status continues to rise, the view that every game needs a remake will become less popular than it is now. That does of course not mean that remakes and remasters will die out completely, for there will no doubt still be a market for them, like it is with movies and series currently. But I think that far more people will be what is now disparagingly referred to as “purists”.
Back to the games in the article:
Apart from a demo of Tomb Raider 2 I never played these back in the day, but now that I am on a PS1/Saturn/N64 kick, I am looking forward to trying out the original Tomb Raider in all its glory. With a filter that gives it a suitable CRT-television look of course.
Re: Review: The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening - A Magical Remastering Of A Series Highlight
This remake is very cool looking, but the definitive version of the game is still the monochrome original. Some people like the game boy color version too, but I will always recommend the original one over that one, due to its garish colors and overpowered items available later in the game.
Re: Review: Dragon Quest II: Luminaries Of The Legendary Line - The 'Difficult Second Album' Of Enix's Classic Series
I played through the original NES version of this for the first time recently. Without any guides of course. I was pleasantly surprised by it and had a lot of fun.
It was not as good as DQ4 or DQ3, but I enjoyed it more than DQ1, which is charming but also a very basic game where you need to grind a lot.
Most things in this game can also be found in later more sophisticated JRPGs, but apart from the "classical" NES Dragon Quest feeling, what it has going for it is a little more challenging adventure elements, resource management and battles than in most JRPGs, and a nice lyrical translation with a lot of anachronistic expressions. At times it the dialogue almost sounded like excerpts from old English folk songs. This is again about the NES version though. I don't know if this newer version of the game still uses this same translation.
A lot of the claims made about the difficulty of the original version of the game seems to be mostly horseshit. The game isn't really difficult or unfair. It has an increased difficulty once you get to the endgame, but it is one that feels suitable and gives you a sense of higher stakes, but is not frustrating.
In total, my party lost/died ten times when playing this game. Eight of them were in the endgame, and only two of them due to random chance. Those deaths that happened due to random chance, only cost me a few minutes as well, since they can only happen right after a savepoint, something people never mention when criticizing this aspect of the game.
10 deaths in total isn't much. When I play a difficult NES or SNES action game, I die many, many times more than that before I manage to complete it.
I have concluded that the reason why games like this one and Phantasy Star 2 receives such a bad reputation is that most JRPG fans doesn't much difficulty or planning in their games. They seem to prefer to have a very relaxed experience where they mostly can just click "attack" to get through the game. I like this relaxed experience too, but it is much more fun if you actually have to think a little about the systems that are in the games.
Re: Best Nintendo Switch Shmups
Haven't seen it, but going to have a look at it later. Rankings are fun.
Re: Best Nintendo Switch Shmups
@Falksi I agree that the selection on the Mega Drive is a lot better. But to be fair, the Mega Drive probably has the best shoot 'em up selection of any console, the only ones that can compare are the Saturn, the PlayStation and the PC Engine.
But for a modern console this is actually quite impressive.
In my opinion the old classic 16 and 8-bit shoot 'em ups from the consoles and arcades are much superior to modern shooters in the Cave style.
Bullet-hell shoot 'em ups can be fun to play once in a while, but their gimmicks gets old fast, and the atmosphere in the classic shooters are just so much better than the overtly busy soundscape and playing fields in Cave-style games, with tons of annoying pickups and flying anime-girls.
I'm not saying those games are not well designed, or that it was bad that some invention happened in the stagnant genre, but bullet-hell shooters just doesn't stand up to classics like Gradius, Gradius 2, Axelay, Bio-Hazard Battle, Thunderforce 4, Eliminate Down, Gaiares, Truxton or 1943 for me.
Re: Mini Review: Tormented Souls - A Survival Horror Homage For Genre Nuts Only
@Olliemar28
I think it is a good idea to make potential buyers aware that some aspects of a game could considered to be old-fashioned, or even outdated, according to popular opinion.
But one thing I take issue with, which often comes up in discussions of old games, is the strange misuse of the world "nostalgia". A lot of the people who use the word in gaming discussions do not understand its meaning, but I do expect better of a professional game reviewer.
Some people have a preference for certain game mechanics, graphics styles, music styles and sound design. Sometimes people even prefer certain styles over other styles. Regardless of whether these styles could be described as dated or not, it is a misunderstanding to describe such preferences as "nostalgia".
If we think a little more broadly outside the medium of videogames, we find that many people often have preferences for certain types of music, art styles or movie genres. Probably in a majority of the cases you will find that the genres and styles people like the most, are also genres they encountered in the formative years of childhood, teens and early adulthood.
If someone has a particular fondness for new wave music from the 80's, would you describe it as "just nostalgia"? Or someone who likes horror movies because he read a lot of horror stories as a child. Is that also "just nostalgia"?
I think it is silly, and also a little demeaning to reduce people's preferences this way, and it is also a misuse of the word itself.
Nostalgia as a concept would more properly apply, when someone is reminiscing or replaying a game, they actually played a long time ago, but when talking more generally about having preferences for a certain style, it should not be used.
Personally I like both new and old games, and enjoy a variety of aspects in both. I can definitely understand the importance and hard balancing act for modern reviewers, to not let their own preferences or the feelings of older gamers about a game, bog down a review to just become worship of something old, with no relevance for younger readers. But please, stop abusing the word "nostalgia"!
Re: Review: Baldur's Gate And Baldur's Gate II: Enhanced Editions - Two RPG Classics On The Go
@Darkthany
That's a pretty ignorant statement to make. It's like saying the people who prefer Super Marios World over New Super Mario Bros' Wii U are only doing it for nostalgic reasons. Or that people who prefer Final Fantasy 6 over Final Fantasy 15 are just blinded by their own nostalgia. Some people throw around and misuse the word nostalgia far a lot.
What many people seem to mistake for a nostalgia is simply the fact the different people have different preferences.
There are no objective ways of measuring quality in a videogame, just differrent opinions. Sometimes some opinons are more popuar than others, but with the course of time they do change.
People should recognice that most of the time people who like different things than they do themselves just have different opinions, it has very little to do with nostalgia.
Objective truth can be found in the natural sciences, not in videogame journalism or art criticism.
By the way, I have never played Baldur's Gate. But I do think that it would appeal to my tastes.