That's why I love UFO 50.
It really went hard at capturing what I love about classic games. The Desert Western RPG was so good, even with all of its grind.
this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2025
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We know what is possible today. When these old games were new they were quite frankly cutting edge and pioneering what was possible.
You don't achieve that today even with the most dedicated adherence to retro limitations.
One could argue that the dynamic shadows of the day and night cycle in Sea of Stars were actually kind of breaking new ground in pixel art.
The era of NES was wild. I don’t think it is purely kid’s-experience nostalgia although that is certainly a factor. A lot of the language of gaming and the genres that are still in existence in some form today were being created for the first time, mostly from thin air. Wolf3d and Doom were probably the last time that a new “language” for gaming was created in that same way, directly in the mainstream of gaming and outside of niche / experimental games.
Also, the scope was incredible. For no reason. I along with a lot of other people had the experience of playing one level or one screen of an NES game and assuming at first that it was the whole game. No, that is 2% of the game. Why did they make so much game? For no reason? With no particular competition that would cause them to need to invest all the resources into creating this luxuriously massive experience? It can only be love.
Nah, Wolfenstein and Doom were not the last. GTA and TES brought us open world games later on. Max Payne brought us cinema-like adventures. Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice is just a complete mind fuck never seen before. And you're forgetting VR, VR is full of unprecedented experiences, from physical action in Beat Saber to immersive story in HL: Alyx to time manipulating Superhot VR. And my personal favourite - No Man's Sky, it's just a very unusual game.
I'm not talking about just creating something that hadn't been seen before. That's always going to be happening. I'm talking about creating a genre from scratch that didn't exist at all before.
HL: Alyx does some great stuff but it doesn't have buttons that do basic concepts that buttons hadn't done before, in the same way that run/jump/shoot was invented as functions for the A and B buttons in Super Mario, or the inventory screen was invented for Zelda 1. I'm not intending to be critical of the idea of building on new stuff and inventing new paradigms to go on top of it. I'm just saying that the initial creation is a special type of time.
I would actually describe the structure of VR games as a feature that has prevented them from seeing widespread adoption in the same way that the early game consoles got near-universal adoption: They don't invent a new language. They just try to retrofit the existing languages of first-person video games into their new environment. Maybe there is no new paradigm that's suitable for VR in a way that would make it groundbreaking and make possible some things that are totally different from "sticking the player in first person into a first person game instead of showing stuff on screen." Maybe there is and it just hasn't been invented yet. I don't know. But it seems like they're not adding all that much beyond just immersing you in the game world. They're still looking for that change that happened before from Adventure to Zelda or from Pitfall to Mario.
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As Yahtzee has suggested, people aren't nostalgic for old games, but for how they felt playing old games. Much harder to capture that, and beautiful pixel art alone isn't enough.
Because as a child, everything is novel and new for you so you get that sense of high and awe seeing something new. But now as adults, recreating that feeling is almost impossible because you have already experienced it before.
This is why I started hiking and summiting mountains. I mean, not literally why, but it’s chasing that new and novel high.
You're also literally chasing new highs though. Sounds like the whole package..
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no indie rpg will ever make me feel like playing Golden Sun as a kid did
That main menu music was so great
I love the entire OST. the Saturos theme is one of my favourite ones
Playing Chrono Trigger as an adult will ever make me feel like playing Chrono Trigger as a kid did.
Yeah, they would need to be able to turn you back into your kid self, experiences and all. A lot of that magic is from you being a child.
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yea funny enough I got that high when recently playing Planescape torment but not Baldurs Gate I, dont know why. Still a good game though.
Baldurs gate is good but it really shows how much they were trying to capitalise on 5e actually gaining mainstream attention (not that I blame em, folks gotta eat) Divinity Original Sin 2 is a previous title by the same company and IMO feels a lot better to play both mechanically and in terms of actually having a unique feeling universe.
OP is talking about the first Baldur's Gate game. Not Baldur's Gate 3 which you are talking about. Also Baldur's Gate 3 was in production in 2017. While it may have been in response to Stranger Things season 1 coming out, I honestly doubt it was that. BG3 is a huge labor of love and that dev team was much more intent on making a good game than cashing in on popularity of any particular ttrpg system. There are no dlc or micro transactions and marketing was sparse. I pretty much only heard about it through word of mouth. If the goal was to capitalize, they failed that. You don't capitalize by making a game that people can buy once and have nearly limitless experiences in without spending a dime more.
huh? BG I is 2nd edition DnD? Played both Divinity I and II, liked I better
Anon is old, anon can see through the matrix.
When you were young you didn't see the game, you just experienced the world.
This is why shovel knight looks and feels like the old classics it’s imitating. They artificially limited themselves to color pallets and some technical limits that old systems had. I think they ended up using 18 colors instead of 16, and double the sprites on screen, among some of them. Indie games usually just go with what looks good and use modern limits because they can. Most the time it’s not a choice, they just do what works and that’s ok too.
I love limited pallettes. I love how in the original Legend of Zelda, Link changes colors a little every time the pallette swaps. I think getting creative with limited colors looks so much cooler than just having every color possible.
Restrictions breed creativity.
UFO 50 is definitely the "Modern Retro" king, IMHO. The only thing missing is box art and manuals.
You'd love Tunic. It's 3D, but damn do they ever capture that feeling, including the manual (which you collect in-game, page by page)
...aaaaand wishlisted on Steam! Snagging it next time it goes on sale
Tunic is just a great game hands down. I think it's in my top 5.
Also really cool game to watch speed runs, becuase there are a lot of tricks you learn throughout your first gameplay that aren't actually locked behind anything, just knowledge. A bit like "Outer Wilds" in that regard.
Eh I don't think shovel knight looks like the old classics. It looks way too refined to me when compared to a nes title.
There’s a more comprehensive breakdown from yachtclub themselves here I was off a bit in my specific examples but overall they do a good job breaking down why their game fits and breaks the mold with lots of examples. The game is a lot more faithful to NES than the vast majority of indie pixel art games. There were a few late-gen NES titles that are relatively unknown but look way more detailed and complex than the typical NES game too.
Check out Retro City Rampage. The creator made a version that works on original NES hardware: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/02/retro-city-rampage-creator-makes-a-real-playable-nes-port/
It looks more like a Genesis/SNES title than NES.
I can't remember if the game's settings had a scanline filter switch or not, but that would be the finishing touch in my opinion.
Maybe because it's not limited. If your comfort games were in RPG Maker, then 24-bit pixels are right, but good art is wrong. If they were on consoles, they should be aggressively paletted and tiled.
Try homebrew. An NES or SNES game will always look about right, because breaking those limits is a thousand times harder than embracing them.
Could anyone id the game in the screen shot for me?
The question is not only what game is it, but also, is it any good?