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Retro We keep getting older, but retro games stay the same

enempi

enempi

Piranha Plant
Pronouns
He/Him
With how many remakes and remasters have happened this gen, I find it interesting how often publishers go back to the well of SNES/PS1/N64 era games. This isn’t a bad thing, and I’m excited for a lot of the stuff announced in the Direct, I just find it interesting how the definition of “hallowed retro classic” appears to be essentially static.

I remember with the Wii VC I was really excited to play a lot of classic games that were 15 years old. I don’t really think about 15 year old Wii games today that way even though I know they are technically “retro”. I remember feeling excited to get to play Ocarina of Time again on my Wii, already a legendary classic game that was just 10 years old. Twilight Princess today is almost 15 years old and I don’t really feel any reverence for it even though I enjoyed it plenty.

Why is this? I know the easy answer is that those old games are some of the best ever, but then how come it seems like nothing else ever really gets added to the pantheon of legendary classic games? Seems like the group is pretty much static and people will just continue to clamor for the same group of N64/SNES/PS1 games. To a lot of people “classic Zelda” will always mean everything up to Majora’s Mask no matter how many years pass.

It makes me wonder in 20 years if people will still be begging Nintendo for stuff like Ocarina of Time and Earthbound to be playable on the Switch 4, or if they’ll be asking for BotW virtual console. Will the children of today be asking for Chrono Trigger in 20 years? Is ‘retro game’ a sliding a scale or a permanent designation for a specific formative time in video game history that people will always want to revisit?
 
It's definitely a sliding scale. A lot of younger kids shove anything in the pre-HD era into retro, and i guess that works for them, really.

I don't think it's bad, personally. Names and concepts are made up, and we can change what they mean at any given time, and losing sleep over it never leads anywhere.
 
We are attached to what we grow up with. Simple as that really.

That said, amongst enthusiast crowd, as we see reactions from people over Live a Live who were not even born or did not hear about it until maybe the 2000s, it seems that there will always be a desire.
 
enempi said:
With how many remakes and remasters have happened this gen, I find it interesting how often publishers go back to the well of SNES/PS1/N64 era games. This isn’t a bad thing, and I’m excited for a lot of the stuff announced in the Direct, I just find it interesting how the definition of “hallowed retro classic” appears to be essentially static.

I remember with the Wii VC I was really excited to play a lot of classic games that were 15 years old. I don’t really think about 15 year old Wii games today that way even though I know they are technically “retro”. I remember feeling excited to get to play Ocarina of Time again on my Wii, already a legendary classic game that was just 10 years old. Twilight Princess today is almost 15 years old and I don’t really feel any reverence for it even though I enjoyed it plenty.

Why is this? I know the easy answer is that those old games are some of the best ever, but then how come it seems like nothing else ever really gets added to the pantheon of legendary classic games? Seems like the group is pretty much static and people will just continue to clamor for the same group of N64/SNES/PS1 games. To a lot of people “classic Zelda” will always mean everything up to Majora’s Mask no matter how many years pass.

It makes me wonder in 20 years if people will still be begging Nintendo for stuff like Ocarina of Time and Earthbound to be playable on the Switch 4, or if they’ll be asking for BotW virtual console. Will the children of today be asking for Chrono Trigger in 20 years? Is ‘retro game’ a sliding a scale or a permanent designation for a specific formative time in video game history that people will always want to revisit?
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I think it’s more 8-bit through 32/64 bit, which is a good 15 year period and 3 generations. Once you get past that, you’re into the PS2/Wii etc onwards, where the differences to today’s games aren’t anywhere near as marked. Wind Waker or Twilight Princess feel far, far closer to modern action games than Ocarina is despite being only one generation removed. The difference between, say, Wind Waker and BotW is about the same time difference as, say, LoZ to Wind Waker but the latter feels huge as games were advancing so quickly back then. I think that’s why the retro window seems to move so slowly- there were huge jumps back then, and todays bigger games, despite the massive leaps in visual fidelity and processing power, can also feel more like incremental advances at the same time, despite the dev times increasing to half a decade. Early PS3 games are now 15 years old but the controls are pretty much the same as modern action games for pretty much all the 3D genres.
 
Anything Pre-HD is a "retro" game, personally.

I would push back a little on the idea that those games aren't drastically different than modern games. Just look at the reaction to Platinum's statement about how they plan on making games that are longer in the tooth that you sit with longer. Ultimately though, any kind of classification is not immutable, people's perceptions change with the times and peoples take on what is and isn't a retro game will be as varied as the games themselves. That's OK.
 
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I mean, retro is relative right? The reason why publishers dip into those specific generations more often though is because 2D is probably much easier to port/update
 
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Brock Reiher said:
The great games made years ago are still better than 95% of games made today. That won't change even if that 5% ends up joining them.
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That's because the great games made years ago represent only 5% of the games made then.

It's called survivor bias. Why does everyone love old architecture? Why does it seem like the Victorians built stuff to last back then? Because all the stuff they built that sucked is long gone. Only the good stuff remains.
 
Glom said:
That's because the great games made years ago represent only 5% of the games made then.

It's called survivor bias. Why does everyone love old architecture? Why does it seem like the Victorians built stuff to last back then? Because all the stuff they built that sucked is long gone. Only the good stuff remains.
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I was actually thinking about what games get remade or constantly talked up from Nintendo consoles post-N64 the other day, and it occurred to me that often the portables get left out of the discussion, when they actually have a ton of stuff that’s either been remade or re-released. Atlus remade a ton of its DS catalogue for 3DS- SMT Strange Journey, Radiant Historia, Etrian Odyssey 1/2, Devil Survivor 1/2. Capcom at least occasionally keeps the Phoenix Wright and Megaman Zero GBA games available. Konami just put out the Castlevania GBA collection. I really wouldn’t be surprised if we saw the DS Castlevania games next, or if Atlus put out an Etrian Odyssey 3 remaster at some point.

All of those are some of the best portable games of the last 20 years, so it’s not like it’s just the older stuff that gets re-released. It’s more that the influence of older stuff is sometimes easier to see and many long-term fans can probably reel-off the contenders for a fairly accurate ‘top 20 SNES games’ list just from memory, whereas games today are both much longer and haven’t had enough time to really settle in terms of what really has longevity.

I also find it interesting how many indies blend influences old and new. Castlevania and Souls seem like a really common pairing for influences on dark fantasy 2D indie games.
 
Because that's when the best games were made. The best years have long passed most Japanese developers, so it's no surprise that they keep returning to their 90s wells for re-releases and remakes. Most Japanese developers failed to retain their talent, failed to maintain their development culture, and failed to build up their younger staff to take over from the old guard. As technology marched on, gameplay became less and less of a concern, in favour of graphics and story; and the games became worse and worse to actually play.

Most modern games are terrible, and even the big Japanese publishers know it.

Nintendo is, of course, the one major exception though. Look at how many people are begging for Gamecube and Wii re-releases.
 
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I think it has less to do with how well these games aged and more to do with the fact that games have stayed roughly the same sans progress in technology and expansion in scope from Gen 6 (PS2/Xbox/GC) onward.

I think what lies at the core of what gets remade as a "retro" title is that these kinds of games fell by the wayside as we entered the modern era and people have woken up to the fact that there's still value to these games proper - something I see as a byproduct of the ongoing consideration of games as "art".
 
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Clix said:
We are attached to what we grow up with. Simple as that really.
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This is it right here. If TMNT wasn't something we grew up with in the 80's and 90's, there would be very little excitement for Shredder's Revenge. We love the IP's that we grew up with.
 
Josh5890 said:
This is it right here. If TMNT wasn't something we grew up with in the 80's and 90's, there would be very little excitement for Shredder's Revenge. We love the IP's that we grew up with.
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Yup. My 12 year old is like all about the new Sheera and enjoyed Steven Universe and Gumball… and I’m like…. Eh lol

Although I did get her to watch Mean Girls and Ferris Buellers Day Off and she loved them… so there may be hope for her yet!
 
Games from 10-15 years ago are just like games from today, but slightly worse from a visual and quality of life perspective. Game design has moved on shockingly little since then (outside of monetization). And neither do they have the reputation of having been crucial to the history of games. So there's no appeal to that outside of a random nostalgia strike.

Games from the 8 to 32 bit era feel very different and unique to what we get today due to technological limitations. They also have cast-iron reputations as revolutions in some area or another that gets their praises sung year after year. There's an appeal to experiencing "the game that established this huge series" or "the first game to have X gameplay". They are part of "the canon".

Like 10 years ago in 2012 we were getting the likes of CoD Black Ops II, Far Cry 3, Mass Effect 3, Halo 4, Assassin's Creed 3 etc. All sequels to previously established series. And 10 years later, what has changed? So why go back rather than just play more recent games from the same companies?

I do think there are some games from 15 years ago that will go down as classics, though - Modern Warfare, Bioshock, Mario Galaxy etc. The modern parade of franchises wasn't quite as established and all those games felt fresh. But it's not like stepping into a different world, as it was in 2003 playing games from 1993.
 
All your ages are showing. Really.

Especially in that same direct we have a retro revival with Switch Sports.

Games really weren't better back then. For every Live a Live, or Chrono Trigger, or Link to the Past. There's a mountain of really bad games. You guys only remember because of survivor bias.

And believe or not, games have evolved way more than you think since the PS2 Era as well. Y'all are just old, and less likely to be impressed. Its okay, it's a natural reaction.

But literally all of my friends I grew up are really popping off over Switch Sports, because the Wii was part of our childhood, same as you guys with your remakes of SNES and N64 games and retro revivals.
 
Retro for me will always mean the same, and I'll see the same games as retro, so the same goes for you. There's a difference with more modern games though, the availability of those, I mean, we still can't play F-Zero gx/ax easily if we feel like, but practically, any game that has a digital form is readily available for anyone. Instead the game that only exist as physical format, they live in our retro memories for ever.
 
Tangerine_Cookie said:
It's definitely a sliding scale. A lot of younger kids shove anything in the pre-HD era into retro, and i guess that works for them, really.

I don't think it's bad, personally. Names and concepts are made up, and we can change what they mean at any given time, and losing sleep over it never leads anywhere.
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Not just pre-HD. PS360 games (especially the '00s half) have a pretty identifiable aesthetic overall which I would absolutely call retro now. (born 97)
 
Pixelknight said:
If I could sum up that home console generation in a single memory it would be trudging through brown and grey rubble.

To be fair the 8-bit era was running to the right across copy-pasted bricks :D
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Wii wept.
 
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I don’t think of PS1-gen games as being more retro than PS2/PS3-gen games.
 
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It really depends on your circle of friends/acquaintances, who you normally talk to.

Whenever I talk to my nephew and his friends, they don't remember or care about anything before 2010. To them, Skyrim is a "retro classic."
 
Pixelknight said:
I was actually thinking about what games get remade or constantly talked up from Nintendo consoles post-N64 the other day, and it occurred to me that often the portables get left out of the discussion, when they actually have a ton of stuff that’s either been remade or re-released. Atlus remade a ton of its DS catalogue for 3DS- SMT Strange Journey, Radiant Historia, Etrian Odyssey 1/2, Devil Survivor 1/2. Capcom at least occasionally keeps the Phoenix Wright and Megaman Zero GBA games available. Konami just put out the Castlevania GBA collection. I really wouldn’t be surprised if we saw the DS Castlevania games next, or if Atlus put out an Etrian Odyssey 3 remaster at some point.

All of those are some of the best portable games of the last 20 years, so it’s not like it’s just the older stuff that gets re-released. It’s more that the influence of older stuff is sometimes easier to see and many long-term fans can probably reel-off the contenders for a fairly accurate ‘top 20 SNES games’ list just from memory, whereas games today are both much longer and haven’t had enough time to really settle in terms of what really has longevity.

I also find it interesting how many indies blend influences old and new. Castlevania and Souls seem like a really common pairing for influences on dark fantasy 2D indie games.
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Here is my hot take. For the most part, every system has its stinkers or brain dead games but I find that portable stuff has a higher percentage that just aged well.

I’ll go back to so many GB/GBC games today and while of course the visuals don’t compare, but they still are a blast to play. And it’s weird because it’s the GB, but a good deal of them feel in a way more refined than many NES games in the way they feel to control. Hell, Link’s Awakening and Oracles are just better games than LoZ and Zelda 2 by a country mile.

Heck, I bust out GBA and DS games and they still feel fantastic to play.
 
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I'll just agree with other people that what most of us think of as retro is tied to styles of games that have fallen out of mainstream (side scrolling platformers, shmups, adventure games, ect.) and graphical styles. Games haven't changed as styliatically from ps3 to ps5 as say, ps1 to ps3.
 
Pixelknight said:
I think it’s more 8-bit through 32/64 bit, which is a good 15 year period and 3 generations. Once you get past that, you’re into the PS2/Wii etc onwards, where the differences to today’s games aren’t anywhere near as marked. Wind Waker or Twilight Princess feel far, far closer to modern action games than Ocarina is despite being only one generation removed. The difference between, say, Wind Waker and BotW is about the same time difference as, say, LoZ to Wind Waker but the latter feels huge as games were advancing so quickly back then. I think that’s why the retro window seems to move so slowly- there were huge jumps back then, and todays bigger games, despite the massive leaps in visual fidelity and processing power, can also feel more like incremental advances at the same time, despite the dev times increasing to half a decade. Early PS3 games are now 15 years old but the controls are pretty much the same as modern action games for pretty much all the 3D genres.
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sir_AnGer said:
I think it has less to do with how well these games aged and more to do with the fact that games have stayed roughly the same sans progress in technology and expansion in scope from Gen 6 (PS2/Xbox/GC) onward.

I think what lies at the core of what gets remade as a "retro" title is that these kinds of games fell by the wayside as we entered the modern era and people have woken up to the fact that there's still value to these games proper - something I see as a byproduct of the ongoing consideration of games as "art".
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Heron said:
Games from 10-15 years ago are just like games from today, but slightly worse from a visual and quality of life perspective. Game design has moved on shockingly little since then (outside of monetization). And neither do they have the reputation of having been crucial to the history of games. So there's no appeal to that outside of a random nostalgia strike.

Games from the 8 to 32 bit era feel very different and unique to what we get today due to technological limitations. They also have cast-iron reputations as revolutions in some area or another that gets their praises sung year after year. There's an appeal to experiencing "the game that established this huge series" or "the first game to have X gameplay". They are part of "the canon".

Like 10 years ago in 2012 we were getting the likes of CoD Black Ops II, Far Cry 3, Mass Effect 3, Halo 4, Assassin's Creed 3 etc. All sequels to previously established series. And 10 years later, what has changed? So why go back rather than just play more recent games from the same companies?

I do think there are some games from 15 years ago that will go down as classics, though - Modern Warfare, Bioshock, Mario Galaxy etc. The modern parade of franchises wasn't quite as established and all those games felt fresh. But it's not like stepping into a different world, as it was in 2003 playing games from 1993.
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I think these explanations make a lot of sense to me. When I first got the Wii 10-15 year old SNES/N64 games already felt very different and novel compares to new games. 10-15 year old games today play very similarly to modern games, they just have worse tech. I’m not saying there’s no reason to revisit these games, but they don’t seem to offer as much of a novel experience as revisiting games from the SNES/N64 era.

Lozjam said:
All your ages are showing. Really.

Especially in that same direct we have a retro revival with Switch Sports.

Games really weren't better back then. For every Live a Live, or Chrono Trigger, or Link to the Past. There's a mountain of really bad games. You guys only remember because of survivor bias.

And believe or not, games have evolved way more than you think since the PS2 Era as well. Y'all are just old, and less likely to be impressed. Its okay, it's a natural reaction.

But literally all of my friends I grew up are really popping off over Switch Sports, because the Wii was part of our childhood, same as you guys with your remakes of SNES and N64 games and retro revivals.
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This is really interesting to me. I’m assuming you’re younger based on your post - do you think with you and your friends the SNES and N64 games just don’t seem that interesting? I’m wondering if we will ever reach a point where we stop getting all these retro revivals because the core gaming audience no longer cares about them, and instead we start to see more rereleases and remakes of Wii era games, and more people begging for ways to revisit Wii/GCN era on modern Nintendo consoles.
 
Dcubed said:
Because that's when the best games were made. The best years have long passed most Japanese developers, so it's no surprise that they keep returning to their 90s wells for re-releases and remakes. Most Japanese developers failed to retain their talent, failed to maintain their development culture, and failed to build up their younger staff to take over from the old guard. As technology marched on, gameplay became less and less of a concern, in favour of graphics and story; and the games became worse and worse to actually play.

Most modern games are terrible, and even the big Japanese publishers know it.

Nintendo is, of course, the one major exception though. Look at how many people are begging for Gamecube and Wii re-releases.
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This is kind of a pessimistic take but I get where you’re coming from and agree. Maybe these companies keep going back to the same era for retro revivals because the stuff that came later is just not nearly as memorable even though it’s now just as old. Certainly it’s not a great sign that people are begging for an HD2.5 remake of Final Fantasy Tactics while something like Triangle Strategy is already here and just not as appealing to most people.
 
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It’s an interesting point of discussion. It’s probably related to the way that there’s a huge amount of popular indie games that are heavily inspired by older 2D games, but with added modern ideas. There isn’t apparently anywhere near the interest in doing N64/PS1 3D stuff, despite them being 25 years old- that’s gone beyond the timescale of ‘loved it as a teenager, making it now’. Which makes me wonder whether it’s just the identified market for those indie revivals alongside the back catalogues being mined by venerable publishers being that bit older, or whether 2D games development is just easier to polish with a small team.

I’ll put my hand up and say I know piss-all about games development here, just wondering why there’s a huge amount of ‘Castlevania meets Mega Man meets Zelda meets Contra meets Metal Slug, all with a modern dash of Souls and rpg elements’. And very little Resident Evil/Tomb Raider etc. Or maybe that’s just confirmation bias of the indie games I buy :D
 
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enempi said:
I think these explanations make a lot of sense to me. When I first got the Wii 10-15 year old SNES/N64 games already felt very different and novel compares to new games. 10-15 year old games today play very similarly to modern games, they just have worse tech. I’m not saying there’s no reason to revisit these games, but they don’t seem to offer as much of a novel experience as revisiting games from the SNES/N64 era.



This is really interesting to me. I’m assuming you’re younger based on your post - do you think with you and your friends the SNES and N64 games just don’t seem that interesting? I’m wondering if we will ever reach a point where we stop getting all these retro revivals because the core gaming audience no longer cares about them, and instead we start to see more rereleases and remakes of Wii era games, and more people begging for ways to revisit Wii/GCN era on modern Nintendo consoles.
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Its not that SNES games or N64 games aren't that interesting. They certainly can be old and crusty though. Though for your information, most people my age grew up with the SNES through the GBA and DS more or less. I played Super Mario Advance: Mario World and it is one of my favorite games. Also, Ocarina of Time is also one of my favorite games.

It's really this lamentation that games aren't really changing that much that are the problem. You guys have really just gotten older and more cynical though those eras. You could easily make an argument that NES and SNES games aren't fundamentally different too. Just look at Kirby's adventure, to Kirby Superstar. Yeah. It's prettier, but on a surface level, it's the same design philosophy. Same with Mario 3 to World. The reality is though, is that it is way different. It was a different time, with different product. Wii games are designed completely differently than Switch games, and the same with PS3 to PS5. I played the Last of Us remastered recently, and boy that game is starting to show its age. Not graphically, but definitely design wise. It was really designed differently than many games today, including its sequel.

And I mean. Just look around to how the market has shifted. We have already been seeing GC/Wii Revivals/Sequels.
Hell, in a single direct we had
Switch Sports, a sequel to wii sports
Mario Strikers Sequel
A remaster of Force Unleashed wii( not really a good game, but again a remake from that Era).
Klonoa Remake

People are also very thirsty for a Zelda WW/TP HD on Switch. We had Mario galaxy on Switch, SSHD, Xenoblade, and Warioware as well.

But yeah, going back to Wii and PS3 games are largely a novel experience especially for me. And considering the likes in my posts in this thread, I think a lot of people agree with that. It's just common for a lot of us to stay silent, because most of the time we basically get bombarded for calling that out. Games are getting different as demographics shift. My wife and I grew up with the Wii and DS as our main consoles throughout the majority of our childhood and now we are in out mid 20s. I personally had a PS1, GameCube, PS2, and GBA as well, but that was more because of my older sister. We are actually the target demographic for games now, which is why so many games are really catering to our tastes. You are musing whether or not there are going to be more releases of Wii Era games..... But honestly it's already happening. We already have most of the biggest wii games released on Switch, and more will be coming for sure.
 
Honestly, I'm ready for my age group to be pandered to. Give me tons and tons of Gamecube/GBA/maybe even DS rereleases, please. I'm tired of sitting through several console generations of NES/SNES nostalgia waiting my turn.
 
enempi said:
I remember with the Wii VC I was really excited to play a lot of classic games that were 15 years old. I don’t really think about 15 year old Wii games today that way even though I know they are technically “retro”. I remember feeling excited to get to play Ocarina of Time again on my Wii, already a legendary classic game that was just 10 years old. Twilight Princess today is almost 15 years old and I don’t really feel any reverence for it even though I enjoyed it plenty.

Why is this? I know the easy answer is that those old games are some of the best ever, but then how come it seems like nothing else ever really gets added to the pantheon of legendary classic games? Seems like the group is pretty much static and people will just continue to clamor for the same group of N64/SNES/PS1 games. To a lot of people “classic Zelda” will always mean everything up to Majora’s Mask no matter how many years pass.
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I think this is a matter of pre-internet vs post-internet. Before the current, common structure of the internet, things were allowed to go away, and people were allowed to forget them. The Wii virtual console was more meaningful because before then most people hadn’t touched those games for a decade or more. Their old cartridges or consoles died. Or they sold them. And there wasn’t any way to re-experience those things just whenever you felt like it.

Over the past 15 years or so, however, you can pretty much always get whatever you want whenever you want thanks to digital games. And even if a particular game isn’t being sold you can just watch a playthrough if it on YouTube. We always have access to everything now, in one form or another. So how can we miss things, or feel nostalgic for them, if they won’t go away?
 
Undeniablybiased said:
I think this is a matter of pre-internet vs post-internet. Before the current, common structure of the internet, things were allowed to go away, and people were allowed to forget them. The Wii virtual console was more meaningful because before then most people hadn’t touched those games for a decade or more. Their old cartridges or consoles died. Or they sold them. And there wasn’t any way to re-experience those things just whenever you felt like it.

Over the past 15 years or so, however, you can pretty much always get whatever you want whenever you want thanks to digital games. And even if a particular game isn’t being sold you can just watch a playthrough if it on YouTube. We always have access to everything now, in one form or another. So how can we miss things, or feel nostalgic for them, if they won’t go away?
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I’d say that’s not really true for Nintendo portables though. The GBA and DS games aren’t available outside of emulation (with the limited exception of ambassador 3DS models). Even the 3DS back catalogue isn’t that likely to be carried forwards outside a tiny group of remakes/remastered. All that stuff is a case of Nintendo not really supporting it at all. I wish they’d just put those back catalogues on the eshop, as outside of a dozen or so SNES games and a handful of NES games, almost all my favourite Nintendo games are portable ones.
 
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Lozjam said:
We already have most of the biggest wii games released on Switch, and more will be coming for sure.
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All of three of them?

The Gamecube and Wii libraries are still largely untapped, and becoming increasingly expensive and unobtainable for most people. There's more of a demand for GCN/Wii re-releases now than ever before!
 
Lozjam said:
It's really this lamentation that games aren't really changing that much that are the problem. You guys have really just gotten older and more cynical though those eras.
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Lozjam said:
Wii games are designed completely differently than Switch games, and the same with PS3 to PS5. I played the Last of Us remastered recently, and boy that game is starting to show its age. Not graphically, but definitely design wise. It was really designed differently than many games today, including its sequel.
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I would like to offer a counterpoint:

Yes, I'm well aware that games evolve still today and you can only superficially compare PS3 games to PS5 games. But consider on the other hand, that for people my age (mid-30s) and above, the game industry shifts were much greater then as compared to now, in no small part to the fast acceleration of graphical prowess and the eventual advent of 3D. Between my birth and my high school graduation the Zelda series went from this:
312919-the-legend-of-zelda-nes-screenshot-you-can-explore-the-land.png


to this:
199693-the-legend-of-zelda-twilight-princess-wii-screenshot-link.png


and I somewhat believe it is difficult to really be able to discern between the nuances of progress now vs. the seismic shifts that were the dawn of the 3D era and the decline of the arcades, at least for those who lived through it. Is it cynicism? Perhaps. I try not to fall into that trap, but the high points of the last decade for me were the growing awareness of Japanese ADV games (or "visual novels", if you will) and new concepts like the "Walking Simulator".

Another hypothesis I want to pose is that the prevalence of sprite art throughout the indie scene has maybe less to do with a desire to be "retro" and more with the growing realization that there is still work that can be done with that art style. Think on it for a moment - when the 3D era was ushered in in the 5th and finally took hold during the 6th gen, where did sprite work go? Outside of a few games on home consoles and the handheld market, sprite art was factually dead. Why? Because it was "lame", "technologically backwards" and "obsolete". We had these cool things called polygons now, why would anyone but some old farts and half-broke Japanese devs still mess around with... SPRITES?!? And so, it fell out of fashion. Like, look at the indie games of the early 2010s - yeah, there's a lot of SNES inspiration there, but outside of a few odd titles here and there, the visuals were more... polished is maybe the wrong word for it, but games like The Binding of Isaac, FEZ, Braid and Journey don't look "retro", instead opting for either a hand-drawn style or a minimalist 3D visual aesthetic.

Some time between then and now we've had the realization that visual style and gameplay needn't be mutually exclusive and I think that, above all else, explains why the sprite style has returned and also why we keep seeing gameplay styles that were once proclaimed dead (remember when "turn-based is over" was also a thing? Bad times) revisited in 3D - for example the remakes of Front Mission and Advance Wars could've easily gone for the "HD-2D" aesthetic, but went with a three-dimensional look instead. Meanwhile, a lot of my favorite "retro" games don't restrict themselves to be retreads of existing works (one of the reasons why I dislike I Am Setsuna is because of how brutally similar it is to both Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy X and fails to captivate either one's appeal), but rather look towards exploring new game ideas within these older styles, which, in my book hardly constitutes "nostalgia".

Rather than that, I'd say it is more akin to the rediscovery of the canvas and the brush in an era of photography and going "what can I do with that". And I think that's damn cool.
 
Dcubed said:
All of three of them?

The Gamecube and Wii libraries are still largely untapped, and becoming increasingly expensive and unobtainable for most people. There's more of a demand for GCN/Wii re-releases now than ever before!
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Man, I really want a FE Path of Radiance/Radiant Dawn remaster. Easily some of my favourite games on both platforms.
 
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