retro games are whatever some sad youtube man called Retro Jimmy who is 46 years old with 25k youtube subs has either sitting untouched on giant shelves next to a “Classically Trained” NES shirt framed on the wall or on a machine perpetually on free play in his man cave in the basement of his McMansion in suburban Colorado he sometimes films videos in front of in order to avoid talking to his wife when he’s not doing his day job as a senior software engineer for whatever the Colorado equivalent of Boeing is
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Naughty dog has been working on crevice sidling technology since jak and daxter. In those games, the crevices don’t have bespoke animations but your camera will be forced to point at a wall while you traverse the crevice so they could hide the loading. Uncharted is just jak and daxter with 360ian brown-realism applied
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halo, metroid prime, and wind waker also come to mind so it’s a shame sidling through crevices became the standard
also pressing finger to your earpiece
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I’ve cultivated a few Spotify playlists over the last few years specifically for this type of music. My parents listened to it in the oldies station in the car when I was kid and it’s basically vanished from the world now unless you go looking for it. One more unfortunate casualty of the general death of the American monoculture.
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To me “retro” always meant anything from the 60s/70s/80s. For video games when I hear retro I think about pixel art and games from the 80s or games that have that aesthetic like Shovel Knight or something.
For everything else not retro, in video games at least, I think of it in terms of early 3d (like games from the 90s/00s) and contemporary 3d (10s/20s). So basically I think of media stuff like that in terms of whatever decade it was contemporary with and perhaps whatever else was going on in the culture at the time.
Pretty much a meaningless term that I don’t really use.
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I do think video game design just kind of stopped innovating and switched over to incrementally evolving sometime around 2012. I want to say the Wii U was probably the last really innovative thing to happen to video games. Now everything is just some variation of everything else thanks to the rise of middleware and game design/ux practices becoming mostly “solved”.
Basically game designers got to good at design. They’re like Apple designers, smoothing out all the rough edges and making everything so frictionless that nothing has any real personality to it anymore. Video games are now basically some version of five basic genres using three different tech packages. Few major companies are rolling their own tech and most small scale developers can’t afford to or just don’t want to.
Feels like era of Big Ideas in games is over or on life support or something. Novelty decreases every year. Development time and costs are too great that the incentives are to play everything super safe.
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I call it retro if it tries to be reminiscent of older games. Like I’d call Stardew Valley a retro game. But not Harvest Moon on SNES. That’s just old. Maybe a classic. Though I don’t know what happens when retro games get old. Maybe they become classic retro games if they’re good enough.
All the new Harvest Moon and Story of Seasons games are also retro games imo.
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