Submitted 2 months ago by misk@sopuli.xyz to retrogaming@lemmy.world
That’s the problem with many modern AAA games. They lack innovation. Since they only look to maximize profits, they stick to reliable formulas that are known to be profitable.
This is the reason why I only play indies nowadays. How many AAA studios have new ideas? Sure, we see, every now and then, a new game that really feels new, but they are rare. Meanwhile, the indie sphere cooks new things constantly. Sure, not all are pretty or good or polished, but at least they try new things!
I dunno about “everything” being a new idea. There definitely were some, but there were a lot of clones of other games and genres being beaten to death just like now.
Mario-style platformer? Side-scrolling beat-em-up? Couldn’t count them all.
This is a whistful nostalgia cherry-picking perspective.
The NES had a metric buttload of games that sucked and were obvious lousy branding tie-ins. Mostly crappy side-scrollers with bad controls and questionable relation to the source material. Back to the Future 2+3, Blues Brothers, the 7up Spot, Yo Noid, and IIRC, California Raisins games are a few I can think of off hand.
There was a lot of clear repurposing of game architecture constantly on the NES - Even Mario 2 was a clone and repackage of another game.
Adam’s Family Fester’s Quest deserves mention for unconnected to IP
Sunsoft was all bangers back then.
I wanted to comment on this earlier but I thought people would think I’m crazy if I started talking about Blues Brothers out of nowhere.
I think the original point stands regardless. It was just that much easier to create something new back in the day because everything was unexplored. People were happy to play a video game at all, with that game being good at all being kinda secondary. Most of them were pretty hard and you didn’t know if it was fair or not yet. I had a blast playing Blues Brothers (on cousins Amiga I think), mostly because you got to play as guys from Blues Brothers and those guys were so cool, dude. Yeah, it sucks now but that’s fine. It did something new for people then.
The problem is we wanted this to go on forever and by now it’s very much figured out as a business which was driving it so far. Most interesting things now happen outside of what big publishers do so at a smaller scale and harder to find too. Valve/Steam is keeping half of that industry alive (or keeping it at their mercy) with their content exploration capabilities but you have to swim through a lot of junk just like before, just not overwhelming amounts.
I don’t disagree with the sentiment overall, and of course branding tie-ins were all about the names and not about the game. There’s no reason to build a game from the ground up in terms of gameplay when you’re leveraging IP. MegaMan is the perfect example of this. Six(!) NES games, even one IIRC after MegaMan X for the SNES was released, that were all little more than slight upgrades to the same gameplay of the original. The game was the brand, so you do just enough to give it some variation, and you’re good.
The counterfactual for this is arcade games ported to NES, which were often much more tied to their IP. TMNT 2 is a port of an arcade game released a few weeks after the TMNT 1 NES game, and look at which of those have the same look and feel of the show. The Simpsons games - same thing. Arcade titles needed to be instantly recognizable as a way to throw money at IP. NES titles did not because once you bought the game, you’ve committed to the IP tie in. Disney did a better job with matching NES gameay and IP, but thats because of their own standards.
Personally, I wouldn’t call too much of that innovation or creativity, as it’s cosmetic. Some, absolutely, bit not much. Very few companies went in for unlicensed cart manufacturing because of the capital needed. Wisdom Tree, the first company to work out how to get unlicenced carts to work, only made 13 games intended for a niche religious market, and their only SNES title was a reskin of Wolfenstein 3D. Sports games like RBI Baseball saw some of the best success because the requirements of NES licensing meant an approved UI bottleneck, which is where going from sports to NES had such a wide array of options possible.
This comment is true for all games, regardless of graphics quality. If a game offers nothing new from a story/gameplay perspective, its graphics wont carry it very far.
Shovel Knight brought with it a ton of new ideas in terms of gameplay, but a lot was borrowed as well.
To be fair, it was like that in the actual NES era too.
Unless you’re an actual enthusiast, there are TONS of NES games that you’ve never heard of, that inspired the gameplay of other games.
Then there’s the games that were japan only, never got an outside release. But then a later game that DOES get an outside release uses elements from those games. From out perspective, that 2nd game invented that formula. You find out years later it wasn’t.
That’s how all art is.
Yes well, even though I was raised by artists and have given over a large portion of my life’s energy to creative pursuits, nobody actually told me that art is the study of choice (and everything started clicking into place) until about a year ago and I’ve been riding that high ever since.
Old games stood on their own merits: artwork, sound design, game mechanics. I have no idea what “retro authenticity” is supposed to be, but it doesn’t sound like it involves inspiration or imagination.
Super Amazing Wagon Adventure was a great example of retro style mixed with modern wtf madness
Jump the river, always
Ashtear@lemm.ee 2 months ago
This is a great example of how some retro-style projects get it and some don’t. The successful projects are the one that have the feel of the games you used to play in the context of today’s gaming, not the ones that do a historically accurate, 1:1 conversion. There’s an art to it.