(pronounced the same, actually)
I’ve played quite a few retro titles in my time, and for good reason: Retro, as well as more modern attempts to capture the retro feeling through graphics and/or sound (known as Retraux as a sort of portmanteau of Faux Retro), is one of my favorite styles of entertainment.
The Seventies, which I was mostly not aware of, as I was born in ’78, was the era of the earliest consoles such as the Atari 2600, the Intellivision, and the ColecoVision. These features extremely simple graphics and sound, but that was enough for us, and we enjoyed it!
The Eighties brought with it, most unfortunately, the Great Video Game Crash of 1983, which resulted when too much money was being spent to make copies of inferior games that no one was buying. A great cause of this was the abysmal Atari 2600 licensed games of E.T., and Pac-Man.
Though Pac-Man was okay in terms of gameplay if not great, it was E.T. that sealed the video games industry’s fate; word of mouth and magazine articles spread the word that this game was horrible, and people refused to buy it. However, thousands, if not millions of copies of the game cartridge were manufactured in anticipation of the great rushes that never came. So, many game manufacturers just gave up. There was no real incentive to keep making games that the public wouldn’t like; the hardware capability just wasn’t there.
Then, in 1985 came the turning point; the Nintendo Entertainment System! This from a company that as far back as the late 19th century, manufactured playing cards (“hanafuda”), and they had revolutionized the gaming world.
This was the beginning of new eras in gaming; from the 8-bit era of Nintendo, Sega Master System and Turbo Grafx-16, to the 16-bit Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis, to the first disc-based system called the PlayStation (and several more systems that fell under the radar of the gaming public, the 3DO, CDI and to a lesser extent Jaguar); on to the cartridge-based Nintendo 64, where many Nintendo properties re-established their dominance; thence to the currently-previous generation of consoles: the PlayStation 2, Gamecube, and Xbox.
Now, in modern times with powerful PCs, the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, the Wii (and upcoming Wii U!) there’s been a push to return to those, some say happier years when graphics and sound were simpler, but gameplay was still rich and pure. These games, known by some as Retraux games, have a special place in my heart. You can find these games easily on the Internet (Japanese-made Doukutsu Monogatari, or Cave Story, is a Metroidvania-type gated exploration game), or on download services specific to platform.
For instance, Steam has the previously-reviewed Terraria, as well many other retro-themed games like VVVVVV, which is a very simple platformer-exploration game in which you do not jump but switch gravity at a button press, making for some very interesting puzzle situations. And the Xbox 360 has Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, which, much like the movie it’s based on, is heavily inspired by the NES title River City Ransom.
So, if you ever get tired of your fancy graphics and fully-voice-acted cinematic experiences, take a stroll down memory lane and pick up a Retraux game today!