Tag Archives: retro

The Neo-Retro Urge

If you play independent digital games, you’re surely familiar with the retro style. Even the scary mainstream publishers have put out titles like Megaman/Rockman 9. This neo-retro approach — I’m not sure if there’s a common name for it — has modern developers make new games that could theoretically run on old hardware. There are quite a few excellent neo-retro games out there, like La-Mulana, a tribute to the MSX, most of the entries in the TIGSource Bootleg Demakes competition, and a work-in-progress game I’ve been playing today, This game is Wizard.

I’m making a distinction here between neo-retro games and games that just use “retro” graphics. Pixel art like in Cave Story or lo-fi art like in Cactus’s games are purely artistic choices, and don’t necessarily represent a deliberate restriction of the game design like the neo-retro approach. That’s what it is, really: a restriction.

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TIGSource Bootleg Demakes Competition

The Independent Gaming Source recently finished the submission period for their Bootleg Demakes Competition. Contestants had to “demake” a well-known game as if it were illegally ported to a more primitive system by shady bootleg developers. There were a lot of great or promising games turned into less graphically great games – Mirror’s Edge, Homeworld, Team Fortress 2, and Shadow of the Colossus all got treatments, for example. A few of the submissions, however, stood out to my own personal tastes as notable, like a Lovecraftian Katamari Damacy and a Tetris RPG. Click through for the list.

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