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| I wish I'd been this cool in the 1980s. I didn't have Walkman - just a crappy pocket radio with a single earphone, so it looked like I had a massive hearing aid. |
In the manner of a person attending a job interview and letting off a firework concealed in their mouth in answer to the interviewer’s first question, I’d like to start with a bit of a controversial bang: I don’t quite get how retrogaming has become such a ‘thing’.
I mean, I understand what it literally is of course – playing old games. There are some old games I quite like in fact, and sometimes I even replay the odd one myself. And I’m all for modern HD remakes that mean I can enjoy the experience in the here and now without the chronological shortcomings of blurry pixels, poor control schemes, hardware stutter, and of course having to buy stuff from a disinterested sweaty salesman in Dixons in the first place.
But: here’s the parping retro elephant in the room, whose dung is starting to pile up to worrying levels – both you and I know many old games look, sound and play horrendously, and once re-seen ‘in the flesh’ rather than viewed through your mental nostalgiascope are only 5% as good as we remember them being. Plus the further back you, go the truer this is.
Yet retrogaming is now big enough to support devices and even whole events entirely dedicated to it. How has this happened? It’s just manky old stuff, guy!
Crusty banger
Take the Evercade, for example. There must be enough demand to make a new handheld games console that plays loads of old titles viable or it wouldn’t even exist, and some of the less dated stuff on it like Earthworm Jim doubtless remain fun to play. But you can also get Atari 2600 games on it. Games that came out almost 40 YEARS AGO, and absolutely look every one of those musty years old.
Outside of a few minutes of curiosity, I don’t get why anyone would want to endure such crusty old bangers. And, of course, that curiosity could be satisfied with a free emulator running on even the feeblest of PCs or smartphones rather than spending £££s on a new gizmo. So I have to wonder…is it the games, or is it really the hardware that’s the big draw?
The other side of it is retro enthusiast one-upmanship, where fans seem to try to find the most obscure, awful nonsense so they can say “Look! Look what I’ve found!” when stumbling across a game no one has heard of since Milli Vanilli were in the charts, treating it like a revelation on par with unearthing a lost Shakespeare manuscript for “Taming of the Shrew 2: Shrewlectric Boogaloo”.
The reality? It’s probably just another badly coded knock-off that looks like the flashing dots machine they use in Boots to check your peripheral vision when you’re having an eye test, sounds like you’ve developed tinnitus while visiting a buzzer factory, and is as tedious to play as completing a cryptic crossword where all the clues are written in binary.
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| You can tell this isn't a real subway on account of there not being some annoying twat playing the guitar and then demanding money for his awful rendition of "Hey Jude". |
Brown smears
This, of course, is retrogaming’s problem: there are only so many times you can talk about, play, and find new and interesting info on the REAL classics, and genuine forgotten gems are incredibly rare. But to fill this content gap it increasingly means any old dreadful tat is now sought out and often elevated on merit of its age alone to a status it doesn’t deserve, just to give people something ‘new’ (old) to chase down, look at and play.
And that’s the bit I don’t get. There are so many great and interesting games out now, why seek out and laud things from decades ago that died on their arse even when they were contemporary? After all, games aren’t whisky: they don’t get better with age. Just mouldier.
Sure, sometimes fossil hunters find T-Rexes, but a hell of a lot more often all they turn up are vague brown smears on a rock from a boring old bit of seaweed – and would Jurassic Park have been as exciting if the camera had panned back from Hammond’s jeep, to the strains of John Williams’ epic score, only to reveal a landscape strewn with stinking piles of pre-Cambrian bladderwrack?
Obviously, no. And that’s the unspoken truth of it: most old games = ‘damp fronds’, not ‘exciting fangs’.
However: playing new games that have a retro style, while doing things that the limitations of ancient hardware would have rendered impossible and telling new stories at the same time? Yeah, that I can easily understand and buy into. And indeed I did, having paid actual money for new-to-the-Switch retro love-in, 198X.
Puffy-jacketed skank
Set in a non-specified year of that decade, 198X tells the story of a young teen growing up on the edge of a big city, feeling like an awkward misfit until they discover the neon lights and kooky characters of an old-school arcade. Except of course it’s only ‘old school’ to us: old school back then would have been a load of farthing-powered bagatelle machines or something. A videogame arcade would have just been ‘school’. Though not an actual school, obviously. (Look, let’s just pretend I didn’t even start this mess and move on.)
The story in 198X unfurls via you playing through homages to a number of games of the era like OutRun and R-Type. These are all original titles however, and you only play through a handful of levels of each (although I’d love full games for some, they’re so well done). You can immediately see where their inspiration lies though, and the essence of the games they hail from has been captured impeccably. They’re like little fun-size mars bars of gaming!
Despite being teeny they’re nevertheless remarkably well rounded, with power-ups, checkpoints and even bosses. And, in proper 80s style, there’s a fairly unforgiving level of challenge – the Shinobi clone in particular will have you relying on twitch gaming skills that would do any puffy-jacketed skank who lurked round arcades in the 1980s proud.
The only slightly odd choice (and the one I can’t pin down to any particular ‘muse’ game) is the RPG stage – not because it’s not of this era, as such games certainly existed then. More because it doesn’t really quite fit the arcade theme and is closer to the sort of thing you’d have played on a home console. It’s still fun though and not too jarring, so we’ll let it slide.
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| It's slightly unfortunate that the sprite effect tunnel does kind of make it look like you're driving through a vortex of rancid popcorn. |
Don’t you forget about me
Interspersed between games are cutscenes rendered in 16-bit pixel art style, and a soundtrack that 100% nails the synth-heavy music of the era. In fact, for anyone like me who grew up around the time, this whole game captures the atmosphere of an angsty 80s teen coming of age movie so well it was almost a surprise to get to the end and not see John Hughes’ name come up in the credits.
The whole thing will only take you a few hours to get through, depending on how tricky you find some of the harder bits, and one annoyance is that the ending is a bit disappointing as it’s entirely set up for a sequel rather than offering any real resolution. But for gamers of a certain age it’ll bring back all the feels in the right places. The OutRun level in particular gets it just right, as you cruise through a neon city with a pure 80s soundtrack.
It’s obviously been made with a lot of love for the games and media of the time, and if the alluded-to follow-up happens I hope they’ll give some of the minigames a bit more room to breathe and throw in a few more genres an as well. There’s a whole decade of source material, after all – Contra, Operation Wolf, or Donkey Kong ‘tributes’ would dovetail nicely.
Nostalgia rash
I know I’m probably at odds with a lot of Digi readers on this, but I’ve played the likes of OutRun and R-Type: I finished them at the time they were new, and I’ve played them again since to reminisce. Now, I’d rather play something like this (or, say, retro-themed platformer Horace) that knows where it’s come from and respects it, but takes that legacy and style and offers something fresh with it.
To me, that’s infinitely more interesting than dredging up some also ran from days gone by to scratch an itchy retro rash. Or worse still, playing an old game you loved over and over so often that it loses any nostalgic appeal and ends up as dated as a shell suit and espadrilles.
To paraphrase Kylo Ren, “Let the past go, Grandad – it’s full of wasps and syphilis!”.
Besides, a new game done in an old style – and done well like 198X is – is always going to be far better at evoking the sensation of what it felt like playing the games of the time it takes inspiration from than you’d get replaying those actual games again now. Which I admit sounds weird, but bear with me!
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| This level is *seriously* hardcore. I was so focused playing it, at one point my contact lens dried out and fell off my eye. |
Vaseline
What I mean is this: I remember how cool it was sitting in an OutRun machine as a kid, music blaring and racing along. What I don’t clearly recall is that the graphics were grainy, the speakers tinny, and it was a real sod to do well because the dodgy arcade owner had inevitably set the difficulty dipswitch to ‘utter bastard’. But I know those things are true – not least because I still remember my mum telling me off for spending 10 quid on continues.
Yet in my mind’s eye, everything is much smoother, the sound less beepy-boopy and the experience more fun because memory is imperfect. You remember the good stuff, not the rough edges and the nitpicks, or indeed the fag-stained ceiling and manky carpet that was the style du jour of most arcades at the time.
198X isn’t the best game I’ve played, and it certainly isn’t the longest, but it absolutely had an effect on me because it brought back all the memories without the drag of the rubbish bit – the disappointment of a game now not being nearly as good as I remember from then. Essentially, the modern hardware and game design is the ‘vaseline on the lens’ to give you the soft focus you usually get from dodgy mental recall of the 8/16-bit era.
If you weren’t there first time round, so the appeal of retro to you is that it’s all ‘new’, your mileage may vary. But take it from me: sometimes it’s better to just be reminded of something than go back directly to the source, as the past isn’t always brilliant*. 198X does just that – it’s a fun, albeit brief, aide memoire. Anyway, thanks for coming to my TED talk on retrogaming thinly disguised as a review (I won’t be taking questions at this time).
*Apart from stovepipe hats of course, which remain unassailably excellent.
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