Uneducated Opinion
Scott Pilgrim Kickin’ it Retro
By Mike - June 16, 2010
A lot of popular trends from the 80′s and early 90′s that were once highly regarded should have, in hind sight, been stuffed into a suitcase and thrown into a wood chipper. This goes for anything with florescent colors, Steve Urkel, and the entire band Poison. These horrendous embarrassments were good for a few laughs at the time but since then we have hopefully learned our lesson: when you’re alone and bored some things seem like a good idea, but in the end you can never look at your dog the same way.
Possibly the most treasured artifact to be salvaged from a time of fashionable failure was the 16-bit era of side scroller action that produced more lasting memories than your experimental college years which your traumatized roommate wont soon forget.
At what point did the style of retro 2D games stabilize and begin to withstand the test of time? For years Space Invaders was the poster boy for cutting edge technology and entertainment, while it’s still a fun game that is more difficult than explaining the anal nitrate and pack of half frozen wieners under your bed, from an ignorant 21st century perspective it is an embarrassing eye sore that should be shot back into space with all the bald nerds who still play it.
It wasn’t until the 16-bit era dawned and eventually faded in the mid 90′s that we can now look back with fond memories of the style with limited amount of detail and sound quality. I can’t help but think that the recent onslaught of plat formers and beat’em up games that we’ve seen go through the Xbox Live Arcade and Playstation Network will pass quicker than an old bean burrito through your Grandpa’s colostomy bag.
Finally there is a company about to do things right for once. An incredible looking 2D beat’em up game is being developed by Ubisoft and it is called Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World. It features 8 bit sound and a retro 16-bit color pallet with rasterized low-res detail that looks straight from the arcade in 1994. It is based off of a popular comic book called Scott Pilgrim by Canadian writer/artist Bryan Lee O’Malley.
One thing that rubs me worse than the tug job I got in a dumpster behind Dairy Queen is how low resolution raster based imagery has mostly been abandoned and replaced with ‘superior’ vector based graphics that are so crisp and clear they make you sick to look at. Take Castle Crashers for example. It’s a great game and I would be lying if I said I didn’t like it, but with its fancy Flash vector graphics, it feels much more hollow and lifeless, like the time you paid a hooker to say ‘I love you.’ on Valentines day.
Another good example is Earthworm Jim HD. It is literally the original game traced in Flash with some added features such as multiplayer. While its appreciated and all, it just doesn’t have the same charm and warmth that the original had. The best way I can explain my preference of low resolution raster graphics for this style of game is a similar argument I would use for listening to vinyl: it just sounds better.
Check out Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World!
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