"Last Updated 22 weeks ago"
mood: 
nerdy
nerdyI've been meaning to write about dialogue in Interactive Fiction, but more useful stuff (to wit, Alabaster and its creation and technical side sparked a lot of discussion that covered most of what I wanted to) has already come out.
So, I'm going to talk about modern games made with a retro aesthetic instead, with particular focus on Gradius and Mega Man.
... you'd think I'd mention text games here too, but I'd keep them aside; parser games are closer to a genre than a design aesthetic, and the fact that they aren't currently popular or commercially viable (though that may be changing, given the right niche market) doesn't mean it's inherently retro.
Anyway.
In March, Gradius Rebirth was released as a WiiWare game in the US. Being a Gradius fan of long standing (over 20 years, and I came late to the party) I picked it up despite it getting a lot of mediocre or worse reviews.
Well, I enjoyed it enough to get the purchase price out of it. But I can't call it good.
They'd designed it to look and play like one of the old Gradius arcade games. The problem with that was the the old Gradius arcade game sounded like this. When they made the home versions of the games, they had to pare down the soundtrack to make it work on the consoles, and it was far, far, nicer. Even the laughably primitive NES port had a better-sounding version of the soundtrack. (You'll have to skip ahead to 0:30 or so for the music to show up.)
So, when they decided to apply an old-school aesthetic to Gradius Rebirth, guess which one they picked? The wrong one. (Standalone version here.) For comparison, here is the theme from Gradius II that they were "reimagining" there. Much cleaner, much nicer, and if you were a Certain Age, you'll notice from the first 15 seconds that they're clearly using the same basic sound engine that they used for Simon's Quest and have the same sort of compositional fads in the musical themes.
Meanwhile, a year earlier, Capcom released Mega Man 9, complete with awesomely terrible box art, "Ultrasound graphics synthesis", and an "8-bit Fidelity Engine". It looked, sounded, and played as if it could have been an NES game. (Mostly. There are a couple of places where they cheat a little with crossfades, and a couple of places where the NES might not have been able to handle that much animation. But you have to both be looking for it and have deep technical knowledge of the console to notice.) Here's the soundtrack to one of the stages. Granted, Capcom didn't have a choice of style to match when they decided to take Mega Man retro; but they could have flubbed the execution and didn't.
The short form of this? Just because you've decided to look like you're an artifact of an earlier era doesn't mean you don't still have to get it right; at best, it merely means that "getting it right" isn't a ten million dollar project.
