THE LINE - By Prototron

Retro.
What does that word  mean when it comes to games? Everyone has their own ideas of what is retro depending on age and they are all different. Even the grubby teen can now look back and call some PS3 games 'retro' as indeed they are to him/her. For some though, retro really just means pre-3D where games were almost exclusively 2D pixel art and custom sound chip all written in mind bending assembly code so hence this will be the temporary definition of 'retro' for this article alone.

  Everyone these days seems to love retro games but why is that? Nostalgia would be the primary culprit in that question as a bunch of ageing men, hurtling towards the dark side of their thirties just as fast as their hairlines shoot back, re-live childhood memories through chunky grey and black games consoles and computers but it doesn't start and end with these creatures. Retro games and systems can be found in the bedrooms of today's twenty-somethings and even the scabby millennium children are cutting about with Super Mario, Sonic and Pac-Man T-shirts..

So what indeed is the attraction?

The pull of retro games are twofold – 1. they are fun to play and 2. people of all ages are waking up to the fact that video gaming didn't just start in the 70's and continue on until this very minute. Oh no, there does exists an invisible border where retro gaming ends and modern gaming begins and therefore the worlds of retro and modern games don't simply exist as just 'older' and 'newer' games but are completely separate genres in their own right but where did it all start and end?

Looking at the proverbial history books, it was around 1995 that games started to take a noticeable change. PC CD-ROM had become increasingly popular with it's comparatively huge memory capacity and speedier chips and these tasty hardware treats were offering players advanced Doom clones, adventure games and shooters that soon were actual 3D rather than 2D perspective trickery. The big turn though, came with the release of the Sony Playstation, a remarkable machine which sadly was also the start of the end for the much loved gaming arcades as they were then. With a Playstation you could really have a true arcade experience in your own home with ports like Tekken to back up that claim to the hilt. The shift towards 3D had taken a monumental landslide and from then on started the birth and of modern gaming although it wasn't a completely clean cut line as 'old -skool' held on for dear life for a good few years but the changes were happening and the climb has been gradual but steady these past 20 years.

An easy medium to judge these changes aside from the gameplay switch is the graphics. Retro games can be easily distinguished by their use of semi-low res pixel art, the parent of such terms as bitplane and raster or pixar or planar. These graphics were basically made up of tiny little squares put together to form pictures (rather a sweeping statement as it could be argued that all game art is made up of pixels of some kind but the retro and modern are different) The retro games of the late 80's/early90's usually ran at around the resolution of the 300 x 200 mark (give or take a few hundred here or there between systems) and graphics artists were limited by these dimensions. Whereas today’s game graphics can really just be playable cartoons the retro artists came up with a wondrous style that wasn't cartoon and wasn't trying to be real either, it was some cross bred beast that produced some of the most beautiful pixel art ever and it was merged into a living breathing game.

Look at the character design of Street Fighter II: The World Warrior and compare it to the anime/cartoon like Alpha series and you will see a good example of the start of the changes in style. The World Warrior undoubtedly has a much more aggressive use of shading and a harder, lusher look all round whereas Alpha uses a very light almost classic animation look with much higher resolution less layers of shades and a divisive palette of seemingly simpler combinations of colour and exaggerated character proportions.

A great example of classic game pixel art is cityscapes and backgrounds of the 16-bit era. One only has to look into the distance in games like Final Fight, Contra III, Vigilante, Streets Of Rage to see some wonderful examples of cloudy, smoggy skylines that up close just look like blocky splats but zoomed out give the most rich impressions. You just don't get that in the smooth flash sculpted worlds of today's platformers and it was the absolute standard until well into the late 90's but the switch was most certainly flicked before that.

 It's hard to find a modern game now that isn't a FPS or TPP game with some sort of texture mapped, rendered 3D. Even the recent modern 2D games which mimic the golden oldies are all ball bustingly high frame rates and uber crisp resolution. The 3D experience has given way to analogue sticks as well as D-Pad controls and a zillion button on the gamepad/controller (or joypad for us oldies) which offer a gaming experience that is unique in itself when compared to the likes of NES or Megadrive games and worlds away from the one button joystick days of the great British computer boom of the 80's but is it any better one must ask? The answer is no! Playing Uncharted for 5 hours then switching to Street Fighter II or Sonic is refreshing rather than a continuation of the same feeling. Modern games offer a superb experience that is almost completely immersive and life gobbling while the retro games offer quick blasts with marathons or speedruns rarely lasting over an hour although the flipside is that the brutal lack of saves really taxed the memory and often took months to perfect.

If that isn't as different a set of experiences as eating ice-cream to eating pants I don't know what is?

With the border well and truly drawn we must, as gamers fundamentally recognise that the games of yesteryear aren't worse or primative but simply different. Backwards comparisons are the scourge of the uninformed brat who will tear down a video of Double Dragon with cries of “tHiS sUx lol haha” when comparing it to Call of Duty of Arkham Knight not even realising the utmost stupidity of comparisons between two technologically different eras and hardly a thought passed to the gameplay.

Gaming isn't like the technology it is made on where distinct improvements are apparent and regular throughout the ages. The new systems offer programmers a world of opportunities where almost every whim of the imagination can be put on to the screen with glorious or horrifying detail but the retro developers had to think, to toil to overcome the limitations of their primitive systems and the result was imagination pushed outside the box, especially from Japan. Having the world at your fingertips has produced some of the most imaginative games ever made for these modern times but as always creativity is the product of necessity and how do you develop a fun and long lasting world within limitations.....

Rather well it would seem, so why do we still think of retro games having been surpassed when in reality they actually peaked for their time then something new came along that wasn't better but simply and fundamentally different!

Striding forth from his lair at Castle Stareskull on morning, Prototron decided to not reign down terror on the villagers, but instead go back inside, crack open a beer and load up Streets Of Rage 2. One hundred years later, he's still there.  A avid music maker (of TERROR!) and retro gamer, he can be found whooping any and all heroes at all manner of SNK-based challenges.