E3 Madness, Part 4: Capcom has balls
Posted by Gary Hodges at 2:06 PM Jul 16, 2008
Above is a little video of the second level of Mega Man 9 (announced for PSN, WiiWare, and XBLA), and it makes me almost giddy.
For those who haven't followed the MM9 info, Capcom has made a bold choice: make it so loyal to the series, so faithful to the classic gameplay that they even go as far as using 8-bit graphics and sounds. And indeed: aside from the lack of flicker and slowdown, the game could easily pass for something Capcom made and shelved 15 or 20 years ago, only to dust off now.
I love it. What a courageous move in this day and age of more 3D, more high-res, and more pyrotechnics! And watching the video (namely the trouble the player has in navigating a perfectly old-school pair of enemy-guarded platforms), it's obvious the gameplay makes no concessions for any modern concept of what a game's difficulty should be, either.
After playing through and loving No More Heroes, which is thick with pixelated visual flourishes and tinny, 8-bit musical fanfares, I wondered if someday we might see games using a prior generation's technical shortcomings as just another tool of artistic expression. Like Rodriguez and Tarantino digitally adding scratches, grain and missing reels to Grindhouse or even Spielberg shooting Schindler's List in black-and-white, would game developers someday add things like flicker, slowdown, limited frames of animation, horrendous Engrish or even pop-up to a game to better express themselves?
Capcom - with Mega Man 9 - seems to say yes.
Comments
Grindhouse's fake digital "film" effects were lame. Sure, a lot of awesome low-budget movies from the 70's and 80's suffered from scratchy film stock, sound miscues or whatever. that shit contributes exactly zero toward actually making those movies good. So going out of your way to insert simulated versions of those flaws into your movie is just a cheap, creatively bankrupt way to try to refer to the awesomeness of other movies. Didn't need those gimmicks for Pulp Fiction; he just took the elements that actually made the old genre movies cool in the first place and updatded them, creating something new in the process.
I would hate hate hate to see dumbass developers adding flicker to a game to make it look "retro". Fuck that. If you want to get inspired by Mega Man 2, get inspired by the awesome gameplay or the slick 2-d graphics. You know, the "good* parts of the game. If that isn't a huge doye I don't know what is.
Posted 07/18/2008 at 03:08:42 PMcan't wait for this :D it looks totally hardcore, like the good old days when games didn't hold your hands and lead you through, rather spanked your ass and sent you home to cry.
Posted 07/21/2008 at 06:20:38 AM