The Game & Watch Gallery series is beautiful, they're like playable old cartoons to me. I love Nintendo's first party games on GB and GBC in general they're like aesthetic perfection to my brain, neuron activation, there's clear artifice to it all but it still feels alive to me, lots left to the imagination to fill in the gaps.
My favorite thing about R&D1's early output is that while there's games heavily inspired by contemporary schtuff of the time, Metroid being inspired by Alien, there's also things inspired by what these old Japanese men who grew up in rural areas experienced and loved in their younger years. Zelda was inspired by kid Shigeru's spelunking, Donkey Kong was influenced by Popeye cartoons, the games had these old cartoony styles evocative of anime they'd watch on a fuzzy tv set and gag comic strips they'd read at the playground or in their bedrooms after a hard day's work. No big mainstream video game company would release something like Duck Hunt in the current gaming landscape; I adore the humbleness of the technology and their ambitions.
As people develop better tools, scopes broadening is a fairly natural consequence, and a healthy one in theory but scope creep will continue to haunt devs to the end of time it seems. Nintendo's has been pushing out hollow crates filled with some shiny trinkets instead of sandboxes for a bit, Bananza and Mario Kart World don't look promising, The company's game design game has been falling off to be honest. I'll play one of their new titles for a couple hours but then I'll play it again and feel complete emptiness, wide as an ocean deep as a puddle, I loathe you open worlds.
The retro gaming journey I've been going on has been valuable in reassessing my feelings about video games, I think a lot of modern artistic industries' "products" have been degrading whilst commodification has intensified because of the bigger is better mindset. I don't think indies looking to the far past's video games for inspiration is a coincidence, there's many reasons, some good, some bad, one that I think is particularly insidious is the concept that game's peaked at that point of time they try to grasp at. These "Amish" developers who not only think this art form took a wrong turn they think it's crashed, yet, instead of trying to salvage it, try to replicate an old model... and don't strive to develop upon it further.
I'll leave this at that, this was supposed to be a short bit of autistic gushing for some pretty Gameboy games but I had to go articulate my feelings more, dreadful.
My favorite thing about R&D1's early output is that while there's games heavily inspired by contemporary schtuff of the time, Metroid being inspired by Alien, there's also things inspired by what these old Japanese men who grew up in rural areas experienced and loved in their younger years. Zelda was inspired by kid Shigeru's spelunking, Donkey Kong was influenced by Popeye cartoons, the games had these old cartoony styles evocative of anime they'd watch on a fuzzy tv set and gag comic strips they'd read at the playground or in their bedrooms after a hard day's work. No big mainstream video game company would release something like Duck Hunt in the current gaming landscape; I adore the humbleness of the technology and their ambitions.
As people develop better tools, scopes broadening is a fairly natural consequence, and a healthy one in theory but scope creep will continue to haunt devs to the end of time it seems. Nintendo's has been pushing out hollow crates filled with some shiny trinkets instead of sandboxes for a bit, Bananza and Mario Kart World don't look promising, The company's game design game has been falling off to be honest. I'll play one of their new titles for a couple hours but then I'll play it again and feel complete emptiness, wide as an ocean deep as a puddle, I loathe you open worlds.
The retro gaming journey I've been going on has been valuable in reassessing my feelings about video games, I think a lot of modern artistic industries' "products" have been degrading whilst commodification has intensified because of the bigger is better mindset. I don't think indies looking to the far past's video games for inspiration is a coincidence, there's many reasons, some good, some bad, one that I think is particularly insidious is the concept that game's peaked at that point of time they try to grasp at. These "Amish" developers who not only think this art form took a wrong turn they think it's crashed, yet, instead of trying to salvage it, try to replicate an old model... and don't strive to develop upon it further.
I'll leave this at that, this was supposed to be a short bit of autistic gushing for some pretty Gameboy games but I had to go articulate my feelings more, dreadful.
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