Does anyone else hate "retro throwback" games?

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Anteater Alien said:
My least favorite games at the moment at the hurr-durr le retro shitfucks that get thrown together. Especially on sites like itch (no surprise). It's a clusterfuck.

I've noticed things like the "PICO-8" engine, which is meant to be a fake console of sorts that looks le retro, is the worst victim of this. The concept of a fake game console you can make shit on is cool and all, but all of the games that people make are the exact same and just want to be retroslop.

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Don't forget Joseph promoting Evee's (See floraverse thread.) Christmas game.
 
Have been sick of lazy pixel shit for a long time and was happy when I saw people dabbling into low poly games. My happiness turned into horror upon seeing the kind of people flocking to that aesthetic.
Mind you, I think pixel graphics can look great so I don't entirely hate them just hate this cope of "throwback to NES/8bit consoles" then it looks like a piece of shit that does not even try to emulate 8bit graphics, just admit you were lazy or did not have the skill to do something better.
 
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I hate it. I was excited to try Conscript but immediately changed my mind when is saw the 8 bit design.
 
I am pretty sick of indie pixelshit in general, as they tend to just be rather droll reinterpretations of classic games with added dykes or other assorted bits of faggotry.
BlazikenLover said:
My happiness turned into horror upon seeing the kind of people flocking to that aesthetic.
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I was pretty excited to be seeing people making low poly retro games too but it almost immediately got overrun entirely by trannies. I bought Lunacid on a whim over X-mas and groaned as soon as I saw they/them pronouns in the character creator.
Maker's Mark said:
I hate it. I was excited to try Conscript but immediately changed my mind when is saw the 8 bit design.
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My favorite thing lately has been the 'beautifully animated 2D trailer for indie pixelshit' bait and switch a lot of indie devs are doing. Soon as i see a 2D trailer for a game I immediately wait for the gameplay to start and then get extra mad when it's 8 bit bullshit.
 
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skykiii said:
Hold on there, pardner! I'm wise to your game! You want me to come up with something you can stick in random.txt don't you?

......................

Anyway, back on topic....

Earlier we were discussing retro game design that gives a second shot to games that could've been great or just dead genres in general. A video I just watched reminded me there's not enough Myst-style games on modern systems. There's... Myst itself and that's it.

And I said this earlier but how about horror games or JRPGs with actual good stories? Horror especially has pretty much been "muh personal trauma" for years.
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Speaking of horror, I personally like survival horror and am a fan of the ps1 resident evil games. Since the series shifted more to action (and so did silent hill) nothing has scratched that itch until recently: Crow country takes heavy inspiration from the original re trilogy and other horror games from the 90s, a lot of the story is told via notes you collect (like in OG RE) and descriptions from the environment and without spoiling the story isn't about MUH PERSONAL TRAUMA.
It is short and not too difficult but it managed to keep my attention.
There are other OG RE "clones" I need to try out or am waiting to come out, hopefully they aren't hot garbage.
 
⋖ cørdion ⋗ said:
Yooka-Laylee and Hat in Time should've defined the second coming of bing bing wahoo (love that term) yet were little more than niche indies among a sea of other niche indies. Look at games like Tomb Raider. They're "Le souls of retros" and something people would suffer through (and learn to love) for the archaic value of saying you beat them. There's a start and an end unlike platformers. You get 120 stars and all the coins, cool? You waded through mud and came out the other end. Platformers, unless redefined in future genre-defining games, are just like giving your kid a fiddling toy. They're remastering Croc (think it's already out on Epic but surely it'll come to Steam) and I can already imagine it getting 99 "very positive" reviews and dying of irrelevancy.
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Both Yooka-Laylee and A Hat in Time overpromised and underdelivered. Both of them kind of suck. Comparatively, Super Mario 64 still holds up. Of course the camera is outdated and Mario moves a little differently than he would on a more modern game (the source ports actually give you a way to fix both), of course not all fifteen courses are designed equally.

Speaking of Super Mario 64, most of the Mario 64 hater hanger-ons are the ones that compare it to THEIR 1990s platformer of choice, stuff like Spyro the Dragon, Banjo-Kazooie, and Sonic Adventure, each holding up that "their" game is an objective improvement to what Mario 64 had to offer.

So what does Yooka-Laylee or A Hat in Time really have to offer in the improvement category? Nothing much. A Hat in Time couldn't even offer an "improvement" in the current status quo by disavowing DLC (it does sadly what mostly every DLC game has, an advertisement for it in the main game). That's yet another thing I like about Factorio is that its "DLC" feels like a real expansion pack, a complete product on top of a complete game without an ad for it.
 
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Sugriva said:
I never got the hate for them. There's plenty of games out there, if you don't like retro styled ones you don't have to play them. Sometimes they look nice, sometimes they look bad, but it doesn't really matter to me. I can look past shitty graphics if the game is good. I also think a lot of the times the "retro style" is used to create a lower barrier of entry to making games for a small team that might not have any talented artists. It's not necessarily a bad thing. Lower barrier of entry means more games to play.
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imo pretty much this whole thread is wrong and gay. I'm not up for negrating and multi-quoting a few dozen posts, but I thought everyone might enjoying that I am very, very mad, one might even say seething.
 
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Sugriva said:
It's not necessarily a bad thing. Lower barrier of entry means more games to play.
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Without a gate to keep the trash out it's harder to find the diamonds buried under it. So many bad games get released these days with no way to filter them. Something coming out on a home console used to be enough to know it was worth playing. There's a few exceptions but it's nothing like Steam where it's 25 to 1 unplayable garbage to playable game.
BlazikenLover said:
Crow country takes heavy inspiration from the original re trilogy and other horror games from the 90s,
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Crow country plays and acts nothing like the original RE titles. It's a completely different style of game and having ammo management doesn't make it the same. We are seeing survival horror games slowly creep out and some of them are pretty good. Keep an eye on next fests and browse the horror stuff. They usually have demos and are easier to find then.

PS1 retro filters look like shit. Going back to low quality textures and pushing the minor defects to breaking point looks bad. I'm not going to say it looked smooth on a CRT but it doesn't look as bad as those filters make it. They don't even have the excuse of system limitations, it's just dark and brown like a nigger's anus.
 
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Shiverpeaks said:
Something coming out on a home console used to be enough to know it was worth playing.
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This is absolutely not true. There were some real fucking stinkers on the NES. "Nintendo Seal of Quality" my ass. Shovelware has always and will always exist.

The real issue on Steam are those shitty Unity asset flip games made by Jeets. It's not the retro styled games.
 
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Sugriva said:
This is absolutely not true. There were some real fucking stinkers on the NES. "Nintendo Seal of Quality" my ass. Shovelware has always and will always exist.

The real issue on Steam are those shitty Unity asset flip games made by Jeets. It's not the retro styled games.
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There will always be bad games made but the barrier of entry made it so the ratio favoured good games over bad. Now it's 50/1 for bad games.
 
Shiverpeaks said:
Without a gate to keep the trash out it's harder to find the diamonds buried under it. So many bad games get released these days with no way to filter them. Something coming out on a home console used to be enough to know it was worth playing. There's a few exceptions but it's nothing like Steam where it's 25 to 1 unplayable garbage to playable game.

Crow country plays and acts nothing like the original RE titles. It's a completely different style of game and having ammo management doesn't make it the same. We are seeing survival horror games slowly creep out and some of them are pretty good. Keep an eye on next fests and browse the horror stuff. They usually have demos and are easier to find then.

PS1 retro filters look like shit. Going back to low quality textures and pushing the minor defects to breaking point looks bad. I'm not going to say it looked smooth on a CRT but it doesn't look as bad as those filters make it. They don't even have the excuse of system limitations, it's just dark and brown like a nigger's anus.
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Sure it is not a 1:1 copy but I found it close enough to the original RE trilogy, could you go into detail about what it doesn't really make it the same? I take you mean stuff like not having fixed camera angles.
 
Shiverpeaks said:
There will always be bad games made but the barrier of entry made it so the ratio favoured good games over bad. Now it's 50/1 for bad games.
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Does that really matter now though? Steam reviews, youtube reviews, random niggas on the internet, have made it so much easier to find the good games. 99% of shit on Steam I never look at. It's usually word of mouth how I find new games to play. Back in the day you'd just walk into the (rental) store and pick what looks cool from the box art. I think things are definitely more efficient now.

Steam recommendations are often pretty good too. They do a fine job of filtering the shit.
 
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Sugriva said:
Steam reviews, youtube reviews, random niggas on the internet, have made it so much easier to find the good games.
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Can't say I agree. I never trusted reviews--not as a kid reading magazines, and definitely not now. If I trusted reviews then I would have avoided Earthbound like the plague and spent my life believing Crusader of Centy was an unoriginal Zelda clone.

That there demonstrates something I consider a problem: there's so many games and for all I know, some game nobody played could actually be the literal cure for cancer. But there's too many to sort through. It's entirely possible some great game out there is being completely ignored.

Like on the Switch, Kemco puts out a new 16-bit style JRPG a month. For all I know one of them might actually be a classic that stands with the greats... but there's no way I'm gonna buy and play them all to find out, and from the looks of it nobody is all that interested in picking up the slack for me.

And any game that *does* get "discovered" is either A) notoriously bad or else B) something that got astroturfed because the creator had connections--usually to pozzed communities.
 
I agree but sadly its honestly probably the best most Indie studios can do considering their size
 
Calandrino said:
imo pretty much this whole thread is wrong and gay. I'm not up for negrating and multi-quoting a few dozen posts, but I thought everyone might enjoying that I am very, very mad, one might even say seething.
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Would you not rather people be playing *actual* retro games though? Not just modern skinwalkers?
 
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