RetroGaming

Sunsoft was all bangers back then.

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.

I am here to defend Blues Brothers, which wasn't a crappy tie-in as much as a bad version of a game that made a lot of sense (and was much better) in the computers where it orginated. I played the crap out of the DOS version of Blues Brothers when it came out and absolutely loved it. I was very confused about its reputation in mainstream US-driven retro culture until I tried the Nintendo versions.

But yeah, I mean, you guys aren't wrong, popular consoles generated tons of shovelware since day one. The entire first party structure of the NES is an attempt to mitigate how bad it got on the Atari 2600, and don't get me started on the libraries of unlocked Western microcomputers.

I don't know that it disproves the argument in the article, though. It's true that nobody knew what the set structures were, and that was itself part of why you could jam together some absolute garbage and nobody in the process, from creators to first parties to reviewers and end users, could tell it was terrible. It led to heaps of praise put on absolute garbage, often engineered by toxic patterns and malicious marketing, but it also led to a lot of quirky creativity.

And damn, that beeper rendition of Peter Gunn was stuck in my head for a good chunk of the 1990s.

For the record, an AAA game is a game with a big budget from a big studio. I think everyone can agree that an Assassin's Creed is an AAA game while shovel knight isn't.

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.

Same way that if you're going to write, you've got to read a lot. My favourite metaphor for creativity is a conversation, and the most interesting "statements" in any creative conversation come from a highly relevant observation based on everything said so far, not from someone who blurts out a complete non-sequitur. A brilliant random comment can add worthwhile variety to a conversation, but they're not the moments that feel like something insightful has been discovered - I hope that hangs together, mostly.

Yacht Club does feel like one of those people who, when they speak up you always want to listen. I don't do much mobile gaming, but I went out of my way to play a bit of Pocket Dungeon. It put me in mind of mobile games from way back before everything was an addictive by design skinner box, but it also managed to be something I could pick up and put down with very little friction. It's kinda perfect, and if I was going to play more mobile games I could do worse than going back.

I mean, we can wait for them to clarify, but the way I read it is that... it's bad that they don't sell their game for cheaper?

I profoundly disagree there, too. There's this notion that pixel art games are inherently low-end, cheap stuff and that's just not true. Plus games are too cheap these days anyway. I bought Shovel Knight full price (several times, actually), and while it's not my favorite 2D platformer it always felt like good value. I mean, the soundtrack alone is worth the price of admission, and all the expansions are fun and worth playing. Even if they weren't, the franchise now includes more interesting games I am glad their success was able to fund.

Not that they don't deserve their opinion, just that it is somewhat hypocritical to use nostalgia to put the game on a pedestal and prevent it from being as accessible. Most devs don't take it as a personal attack to their character to make their games more accessible to players and get more of a fan base going, and frankly, ease of access for a lot of kids of free retro games on their emulators is what has compelled them to later become loyal fans of the franchise. It is not a commentary about the value of games itself, and I will not shed a tear for indie devs that are already millionaires keeping prices high on their games as if it was necessary. Also not a fan of IP laws that are just an excuse of profitting way beyond the cost of development of something.

This would not be acceptable anywhere outside this particular sub-industry, and it does not even make sense once sales have dropped down low enough since the benefit you get from advertising is greater. This only makes sense if you see any sense in huffing and puffing and taking it as a personal aggression having to consider selling your product that has already profited its development costs several times over for less.

Personally, I will not buy it because it is not a genre I particularly like. But I would not mind buying it to see what all the fuss is about on discount. Take that as you will, but the outcome is that I will probably play something made inspired by the game before I play the game itself. Counterexample for me is Tunic, would not have bought it, in fact, I haven't even finished it, but the devs didn't put it in a pedestal so high that I didn't mind giving it a try and adding it to my library. Doesn't mean it isn't a great game, specially for those into the genre. I'll let you get right back to getting offended now.

Actually, a better counterexample: Bastion. Not a fan, but aspects like the quality, the way the game handles replay-ability, and other aspects of the game like the narrator, now has made me a fan of Supergiant Games and anything else they make, even if I'm generally not a fan of the genre. Also why I supported them with Hades on early access and why I played Pyre when I generally wouldn't have.