Steam: 90% off Retro City Rampage ( $1 US)

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  PoxyRadical on 21/04/2014 - 13:52

  I've heard nothing but bad things, but it's a dollar. Also .99c on the US PSN right now.

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  CheapCoffee on 21/04/2014 - 14:05

  Indie studios they lack the money and people to make those graphics possible. For example, this game was virtually created by one developer with 1 pixel artist and 3 composers. A lot of people who play indie games don't actually like 8/16-bit graphics that much, however it is a trade-off that many people are willing to make to experience the creative mechanics and story telling that AAAs often can not provide.

  Remember the price point of their games as well, if I'm spending $50-100 on a AAA title, it better (profanity) work well, but almost no indie game can afford to release a broken game (even at a dirt cheap price) since they have no marketing budget. And even if it is buggy, chances are that the developers will actively try to fix it more than AAA games where they need to pump out the next DLC and the sequel.

  Edit: Sorry, if this had not much to do with the deal itself, will give it a shot :)

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  serpserpserp on 21/04/2014 - 14:13

  The game looks pretty cool, I just bought it. Just the idea of it alone is worth $1, even if it ends up being terrible.
  Although with all the games in my steam library i haven't even opened. This could end up the same!

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  Gehirn on 21/04/2014 - 14:15

  To answer your question 2D graphics are kinda timeless, e.g original mario, pong, space invaders, where as old 3D graphics just look like bad 80's music videos are are visually offensive. These indie games are also made from little resources so there's less expectations. Also these indie games often have good gameplay, in comparison to a generic AAA studio action game.

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  Miami Mall Alien on 21/04/2014 - 14:18

  Please answer me this. If a mainstream game has graphics that aren't bleeding edge and require a $500 video card to run maxxed out, it gets trashed (eg Mount and Blade). Why do Indie games with DOS era graphics get lionized by the press? Why do people think retro games are so cool when their graphics are no better than those of Ultima 6 (a title that required only a machine with 640 KB of RAM)?

  I'm not sure I follow.

  Mount & Blade runs poorly because it's an unoptimised heap coded by some Turkish dudes (with 42 friends) who no speak the English and don't have a Western business sense; its graphics aren't bleeding engine because the engine is spartan (it friggin' supports DX7 rendering).
  M&B is a classic case of Daikatana syndrome; guys getting caught up in a boyhood fantasy and then crashing when they realise the workload they've set out for themselves.

  You go into an Indie game expecting retrophilia because they're primarily made by less than 5 people in a house, not an office block.

  There is no tangible limitation preventing a Triple-A publisher from producing state-of-the-art graphics aside from the obvious: console-centric development. There may be some accessibility concerns but Crysis was a commercial success despite having insane launch requirements.

  We give Indie games a pass because the Indie experience is about playing while feeling totally unengaged and detached, simple sensory stimulation that requires no hand-eye coordination or forethought. You're not paying attention to the looks, story or even gameplay, you're just doing something that's better than not playing a game in a 20-minute window of freetime.

  Then there's games, proper. We play those when we want to live out an escapist fantasy and indulge in make-believe. At some point in the future indie and mainstream will inevitably merge together and be ruined, but for now they serve entirely different purposes.

  Graphics porn is fine if it's backed up with something approaching a story and good gameplay to boot, but more often than not, it's the centrepiece of a several-hour-long technology demonstrator with gameplay and story cooked up over a lunch break by some ruthless executives who see the gaming demographic as ATM machines with acne for buttons.

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  Miami Mall Alien on 21/04/2014 - 14:44

  The other problem is that photo-realism is not an art style so it doesn't get a pass when it looks crappy because looking sh*t was not the intention. Photo-realism is what 90% of games strive for visually but it doesn't constitute an actual distinct form of design, regardless of whichever way you dress it up or colour it. It's just an imitative photocopy, you haven't made a visual medium yourself with it's own rules of geometry or optics, you've just copied physics from the real world and adapted them as closely as your technology allows.

  Indie games with 2D sprites and vector graphics are closer to something resembling an art form because it takes skill abstractly translating your ideas into a limited representation of something you envision. It's closer to a painter doing Cubism because you need to think not in terms of polygons and textures but in terms of having a finite canvas and a limited amount of colours, and having to represent great complexity in it.

  Any gamer can look at games featuring Kirby, Mario, Yoshi or Donkey Kong and know they come from the same place at roughly the same time because they embody a continuity of design and they purposefully look abstract.

  You can't look at Crysis, Battlefield, or Call of Duty and say they are representative of a certain somebody in a certain era; because they could have been done by anyone. As long they have the right resources.

  And that's the point. Minecraft only happens once; Call of Duty has happened a thousand times.

  All that being said, I am not the biggest fan of Indie games but it's hard to deny they constitute the closest video games have been to being an art form.

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  FrankMcFuzz on 22/04/2014 - 08:07

  Oh man. Mount and Blade is so good though.

  This is my contribution to the graphics discussion. I have a Wii-U so you can guess how I feel about gameplay-over-graphics.

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  IsometricBacon on 22/04/2014 - 08:44

  I never understood why people give this game so much flak. It's an incredible accomplishment. One guy was working on this for years, and he had a good percentage of it working on original NES hardware before deciding he was better off porting it to newer systems.

  It's good fun too. It helps if you played alot of NES games - it sticks to its guns (mostly) on being reminiscent of that era.

  I think where people ultimately turned off was from the humour - it's very much the '1000 jokes a minute' style of humour where one in every 15 actually hit. Many of the jokes are references to old games. I thought it was funny, but I had to play it in small doses.

  For a $1 I think it's worth checking out.