Capcom’s Hironobu Takeshita sums it up in a sentence
Tuesday, August 5th, 2008 at 1:41pm by Jack
More from Hironobu Takeshita, who talked a bit about purposely putting bugs and flicker into Mega Man 9:
As we talked about, [Castlevania] features design that hasn’t been done for some time. Do you think it’s important to keep the classic style of designing games alive? Do you feel there’s something intrinsic to that that is important to preserve and continue alongside things like next-gen games?
HT: I like to think of it not as an 8-bit style, but more of an artistic choice, if you will. It’s another type of creative expression, because nowadays, everyone wants surround sound and 3D graphics and things like that, and they get too caught up in that. I don’t think it should be that way, because you could do an 8-bit game. You can do a 16-bit game. You should do whatever is creatively expressive and what you want to do. I think that will open up the whole gaming world in general, by being able to have these creative outlets.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about how Mega Man 9 was a much bigger deal than people realized. Hopefully this stellar quote goes a long ways toward showing what I was getting at. Good games are good games. Graphics will always complement a game’s accessibility and playability, not define it. Unfortunately that dynamic has been ass-backwards for some time. No longer.
August 5th, 2008 at 2:12 pm
i have been saying the same thing, i am with you 100% on that. why should we stop doing art of the past just because we have new styles.
and people thinking if they dont like something, nobody should are odd. If they wish MM9 was 16-bit style, thats no reason to hate on MM9, others like it, and its a designers choice to express his vision in his own way.
Simply wait for another game to be 16-bit style, or keep the memories of old alive in your heart. Nobody is owed anything. Some things come back, some don’t. No logical reasoning behind it, nor should there be. Creativity doesnt work that way and shouldnt.
August 5th, 2008 at 3:22 pm
i agree 100% as well. to me mario bros 3 and mario 64 are the 2 best platformers out of the series. i can’t decide which is my #1 favorite because i have equal amount of fun with both.
August 5th, 2008 at 3:39 pm
Thanks to things like the Wiiware service things like that have become probable again.
I would love to see some company creating a 2d game that had the budget of a modern game and be sold as a full retail game. Perhaps the new Wario game will be that but I have my doubts.
The retail 2d games made for Wii that I’ve seen thus far have not really done much to instill hope for such games as they have been as short as a NES game but have been easier.
August 5th, 2008 at 5:00 pm
I have no problem such approach and I would consider buying games such as this. Still, I would rather see more games such as the new Wario, which uses the current graphical technology into traditional 2D gameplay.
August 5th, 2008 at 5:45 pm
I’m not disagreeing that this is a form of expression, but it’s not exactly creative, as in it’s an old hat Capcom is dusting off.
For all we know, they grabbed the NES Mega Man engine, slapped it in the Wii emulator with a few tweaks and added an option to increase or decrease the emulator’s speed. I already see sprite ripping and proper speed emulation with VC games, so why is this special?
I like the playful looking Mega Man, but I HATED the controls. They were horrid compared to other games at the time. Overly stiff and limiting.
Watch this game requires 40 megs of space.
Anyways, I hope this type of game is not our only choice for future WiiWare titles. I’m still holding off for Street Fighter 2 game that hasn’t originated on the SNES or Genesis, but since Capcom seems to have forgotten how to make a game that can fit in a MegaBit space, my hopes are low.
August 5th, 2008 at 6:03 pm
Bii buy a SD card and tell me how big this rom is going to be again? The guys and girl that made left the company I believe thats why your not getting heaps of new SF games. 2d art is still pretty hard and getting detail out of a limited space is actually a challenge. Take a design class from a good professor and tell me when you’ve perfected dealing with limits like 8 bit games.
Mega man has always been a simple character that even his controls expressed.
Right now every one that needed 32bit graphics in order to make good graphics are trying to make 3d stuff that is ending up just generic in most cases.
It’s a big deal because it is being produced like a new mega man game. You do know most games where hacks based off of jump man back in the day right? I didn’t care then and I don’t care not bring it on!
August 5th, 2008 at 8:52 pm
@AKA Run line 10,
I have “several” SDs card. You honesty thought that in this day and age, someone wouldn’t have at least one SD card? Or, was that a rhetorical question?
You should call Nintendo for me and ask them why I can’t play my VC and WiiWare games from this new SD card you want me to buy.
I’m sorry if I’m not willing to compromise and delete my downloads to make space. I thought this was 2008. Last time I had to deal with this, was on one of my later PCs, a 386 with a 83 MByte hard drive.
Even my old Palm devices allowed me to store parts of an application on the memory card and put the launcher in the PDA’s internal memory. Why can’t the Wii do this? It would solve the storage issues and give them a layer of security.
Yes, I know that those quys have moved on, the master himself forming his own company. If you hadn’t noticed, Capcom is working on new SF2 HD remix games for the other consoles — which I still have no desire to buy. The right team could produce a SD versions that would fit in a 40 megs space. This is the age of MegaBytes, not MegaBits.
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FYI, I’ve been working as a professional artist since 1995. I started out in the game industry.
When I was younger, I worked in programs like Koala Paint on my C64(4-Bit color) and later Deluxe Paint on my PCs and others on my TI-99 and C64 that I can’t recall. I come from the age of pixel painting. I started out with joysticks, then a Koala Pad, then a mouse. The days before layers and undo.
I UNDERSTAND at a fundamental level how to work at the pixel with tiny pallets. This is not new to me and something I’m an expert at doing.
Just so you know, back in early days of doing the artist thing for pay, we were required to know DeBabilizer — I still own a license. What it does/did, is take all of the selected images, create a super-palette of a desired bit-depth, then apply that palette to all of images in another location. It also takes a pre-existing palette and would do an excellent job at applying it to all images. It’s how we OPTIMIZED are 8-bit art. This prevented the screen from freaking out on early systems, something that higher color depths eliminated.
I’m definitely not from this new breed of artist that can’t work at the pixel level and rely so heavily on Photoshop filters to cover up their lack of talent. I’ve been using Photoshop since version 2. Even with CS3, I still do things the old ways. Programs like “Fractal” Painter since 1.2b.
I grew up in the digital age, it’s second nature for me to work on either on paper/canvas or on my comp, so you don’t need to lecture me on 2D art.
BTW, one of my clients is a retired art professor. Convenient for me, but true.
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Nothing against simple, it’s the STIFF and limiting that bothered me. Even simple doesn’t have to be limiting. Some of the simplest things are quite complicated in their workings. Mega Man was not my thing. Neither was early Castlevania games for the same reason.
There was an age when all 2D games looked generically the same and I’ve seen the same thing for years with 3D. Don’t get me wrong, I prefer sprites to polygons any day of the week. I just don’t see this Mega Man as being anything spectacular, and this stems back to the fact I didn’t like it on the NES and that other games playing on the whole retro thing have been creative in their execution.
I’ve been gaming since the seventies. So yes, I’m FAMILIAR with game style you mentioned.
August 5th, 2008 at 9:05 pm
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I probably should have typed slower, I’m an artist, not an english major. That’s my excuse. Oo
August 6th, 2008 at 2:26 pm
8 bit or 1,336,445 bit or the images shot straight to my brain, i don’t care as long as the game is fun.
August 7th, 2008 at 1:50 pm
Amen!