The free-to-play Torchlight game that was in development (btw there was a free-to-play Torchlight game in development who knew? not I) is now the not-free-to-play Torchlight 3.
NOT A BELT SCROLLER
the level ups are, IIRC, not XP based but rather on how far you’re in the game and you start with all your moves and spells instead of upgrading
I’m pretty sure all the levels do is refill your health and give you a snazzy new sprite
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i mean the comparison to gauntlet is because it looks like gauntlet tho
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it’s a little hard to follow what with me saying anything, but I recognize it isn’t a beat em up but then there was a complaint of having a straight beat em up and that was responded to and then I responded to that
actually I’m looking at this and am more confused now
the visual design of that game looks gorgeous, with lush art that’s very evocative of an era
but my god, they really leaned into the burly ugly bearded dudes and a hot chick with an exposed midriff cliche, didn’t they? christ, that’s stale.
but i guess nostalgia drives these things and everyone grew up on this shit
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oh hey those are henk nieborg pixels
cool dude
This looks like one of those mock ups of fake games you might see on twitter.
I initially gawked at how small the field of view was but I guess Gauntlet was pretty close to the ground too.
Beardy men are actually a new character design trope. In the 2010s alt-righters felt so inadequate that they started compulsively collecting manly fetish objects and decorating their lives with them (I suspect). And alt-righters infest games, so games got decorated. Kids nowadays are growing up with that. Retro video games were made only for children (in general) and reserved beards to show that somebody is sagacious or evil. The male protagonists of Battle Axe could not be protagonists in the 80s-90s, they would be support characters.
Even Duke Nukem had a face as smooth as a baby. Now he looks a little boyish for an action hero. If he was designed nowadays there’s no way he’d have anything less than stubble.
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this game looks moderately fun
not quite to a backable extent, but
every game review website in existence circa 2007 complained about splinter cell 5 prototype bearded sam fisher looking like a “hobo” all of them even using the exact same phrasing
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Now that’s just silly. The game’s from an 80s/early 90s western personal computer lineage, when protagonists darn well had lush viking beards if they wanted to. The temporary extermination of beards is something that happened from the mid-90s onwards, probably at least in part due to the complexity they’d have brought to early realtime 3d rigs.
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Some gameplay of this
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I totally disagree but I’m not going to pick through ads to prove my point. You’re right, there is a tradition of literal Amiga Vikings with lush viking beards. Historical characters and antique stereotypes sure. But take a look at the main good guys in any country’s PCs or arcades and consoles, 1970-2000 - if they’re contemporary humans and not descendants of Odin or Moses or dwarves, dollars to donuts they got clean chins.
A retro fashionista would have to weigh in but I think full beards just weren’t as popular as they are now. Not just because of politics or marketing to prepubescents. They seemed more scraggly to people then. “hobo”, “hippie”.
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oof, it’s a paint-over of EGA pixels?
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Ah yeah, I already saw that on twitter and that game is pure hell.
I do like increpare’s fake hardware shtick though.
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this is a new low for not just using emulation
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I guess this is inspired by 999/Zero Escape games? I really dig the combo of music, environmental design, and low-key character art in the trailer.
And I usually don’t care for throwback JRPG stuff, but something about this Chrono/Xeno-looking trailer caused a stirring: