Faux retro vs real retro

It's somewhat ironic that now modern consoles and PCs can produce high definition 3D graphics (which employ such advanced techniques as programmable shaders, normal mapped images and realistic physics) that a lot of smaller developers choose to make their games look like they were made for an 8 or 16-bit machine. I must confess to loving these faux retro games, such as Super House of Dead Ninjas, Jamestown and Fez, but the truth is a lot of the time all that is retro about the graphics are the visible pixels and the reduced colour pallet. Fez is a prime example, because as soon as the screen flips 90° to reveal the 3rd dimension the fact its running on a multi-core processor and dedicated GPU become strikingly obvious.

Fez is beautiful and brilliant, but visible pixels alone makes not a retro game.

I'm not knocking any of these games for their aesthetic, it actually taps right into the core of my nostalgia node, but at the same time I wouldn't want anyone to think they were really retro. Another such example is Retro City Rampage, a top-down action adventure in the same vein as the original Grand Theft Auto. The game looks like would run on a Nintendo NES, but again, it's doing things that are way beyond the power of Nintendo's old console — even if it was the console that ended America's video game crash of 1983.

However, before making Retro City Rampage, VBlank Entertainment were trying to make a similar game for the NES and they've now released a video explaining precisely what challenges faced game developers, both for home and arcade machines, back in the 80s and 90s. And we're not just talking about graphical challenges, but audio too. It's a great education for anyone interested in how games were made, so I urge you to watch it all (it is only 10 minutes)

Fascinating stuff, but that's not to say modern developers don't face challenges too. A Wii U might have exponentially more power than a NES, but with more detailed graphics, physics and sound comes exponentially greater memory, processor and storage requirements. In short, making games ain't easy, whether it's 1983, 1993, 2003 or 2013 and we should celebrate the fact there are people willing to go to such effort to entertain us.

MTW