Excuse me while I put my ranty pants on for a moment. It’s summer, and the drought of high-budget game releases sends me to various digital marketplaces looking for hidden gems. You can find some great stuff out there, but there’s also one big thing I have to say – enough with the nostalgia games, already .
I’m not talking about stuff like Mighty No. 9 , where a rockstar game developer takes the chance to go back to basics and do what he or she does best. I’m not talking about well-designed games that experiment with simpler graphical styles or resurrect long-neglected genres. No, I’m talking about games that seem to have no reason to look and play the way they do except to invoke nostalgia for older eras of gaming.
Look, I’m a cranky old gamer. I used to draw maps on graph paper. I played and loved text adventures. I suffered through the frustration of games that came with little instruction and featured archaic design in order to enjoy the good parts of gaming that I love to this day. The thing is, we’ve advanced a ton since the ’80s and ’90s, and while we left some good stuff behind, there are plenty of things about old games that should stay in the past. In the wrong hands, nostalgic games resurrect the worst parts of our gaming past, not the best parts.
Take pixel art, for example. We all love to remember the greatest examples of the genre like Nintendo’s early hits, where a few little pixels could convey so much to us. The problem with modern designers trying to resurrect pixel art is that it’s actually a very difficult art form. Many games did a poor job with pixel art back in the day, and many modern pixel art games are done poorly, as well. Sometimes this is because a game’s developer didn’t want to hire an actual artist, creating the video game version of a comic book full of poorly-drawn stick figures. Nobody wants to buy that comic book, and nobody wants to play a game with ugly, amateur pixel art.
Other times, bad pixel art comes from artists who simply haven’t mastered the form, or aren’t good at marrying simple graphics with effective game design. This is where you get games in which it’s impossible to figure out how to navigate the screens, or simply games that look like they were lazily copied and pasted from classics like Super Mario Bros. or Secret of Mana. Then, of course, there are the games that use RPG Maker ‘s default graphical assets – great for your own personal learning experiences, terrible for pitching on Kickstarter or Steam Greenlight.
It doesn’t have to be this way. The screenshot below is from the upcoming 16-bit-inspired Cosmic Star Heroine , and shows that a skilled artist can apply their own skill and unique design to old-school graphics and turn out a gorgeous-looking game. Unfortunately, games like CSH are few and far-between, and most developers really ought to have second thoughts before deciding to make an 8- or 16-bit game in order to appeal to nostalgia.
Gameplay is another area that can really suffer from the nostalgia-or-bust attitude. Making a dungeon-crawler? No, it’s not acceptable to refuse to include auto-mapping or (maybe even worse) an auto-map that is so “retro” and pixellated that it’s impossible to read. Making a platformer? Cut it out with the pits of doom. There are approximately fifty bazillion pixel platformers full of pits of doom and unfair, unjudgable jumps out there. We do not need any more of them! Almost everybody hated that stuff back in the day, and we hate it even more now that we’ve experienced the far better alternatives.
Video game nostalgia can be a lot of fun, whether in a well-designed retro game or in popular culture like when Community featured Troy and Abed gleefully shooting lava in a nostalgia-packed video game episode. I still think fondly upon the great times I had while playing games as a kid. However, those great memories are interspersed with memories of the not-so-good games that I quickly abandoned, and with thankfulness for all the great advances we’ve made in graphical and gameplay design. While it’s fun to return to the good ol’ days from time to time, I have no desire to return to the bad ol’ days of games like E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial or (shudder) Daikatana . Cut it out with the nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake and make us quality games, damn it!