Skip to main content

the era of MC Hammer


 

Taking a break from the fidelity of beautiful next-gen graphics to play some Retro City Rampage on my Vita. Its basically Mario channelled through the original Grand Theft Auto by way of a love letter to 16-bit gaming. It also contains time machines. Also rocket launchers.
Bought it earlier this year on the PSN sale and only sparingly played it until my recent return to handheld gaming. Essentially its a game made to fit the constraints of the Nintendo Entertainment System whilst crowbarring in as much outdated pop culture as a single game can contain without exploding from the sheer awesome.

Yes pixels straight out of the era of MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice, its an utterly irreverent game that cares not a jot for story. Its a collection of parodies all falling over each other at once. It should be disaffecting like all things that reach a critical mass of irony. It shouldn't really hold my attention but recently it has done so  Playing it on a HDTV I never gave it much time but on the small screen it just works. 

Not sure why that is. Maybe its due to some primal association I have between handheld consoles and 16-bit games going to my first experience of handheld gaming. Back when my mind was in some way forever blown by the arrival of the original Game Boy and it forever shaped my perception of handheld gaming as something defined by the games and graphics of that time. 

True this game is doing a better job of channelling those warm fuzzy feelings of yesteryear on my Vita than it does on the big screen. Self consciously borrowing everything that worked in games past, it has so far avoided becoming a mess of a game without an identity of its own. Certainly for a small-scale project that was basically someones labour of love it works best as a diversion enjoyed in small bursts of gameplay. Ideal for attention spans measured in milliseconds, like mine.
 
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

foreverware

Once upon a time in the dark ages, in the long ago, in the age before the iPhone and reliable high speed broadband there was the humble video game. You would play it, it would last for a finite length of time and then it would end. You'd move on and play another game, maybe read a book, watch a film, join a ukulele band. You'd cast that game into the realm of memories past, enriched by the experience in some way but no longer actively partaking of it. Now that time never ended as such, those games are still very much around but in the here and now they have been eclipsed somewhat by something else altogether.
Post a Comment
more>>>

anime hair and the end of days

I've just completed a game that, in normal circumstances at least, wouldn't generally be my cup of tea. A game remastered and released in 2021 but which originally arrived in 2010 in a somewhat 'adjusted' manner shall we say?. A game I meant to get around to back then but never did and now that I have finally gotten around to both playing and completing it, I'm not entirely sure if I liked it or not. That game is Nier Replicant or to give it it's full re-released title:  Nier Replicant ver.1.22474487139... because clearly the game alone wasn't baffling enough....
Post a Comment
more>>>

the refreshing taste of cosmic justice

As alluded to in my last post I have some thoughts about the game I have spent most of the last week playing, that game being Paradise Killer , those thoughts being well... these ones.  First up it seems like a minor miracle that I am playing a game like this in 2023 on my PS5 and not on my PS2 in the hallowed year of our lord 2001. it's a game that's quite simple and straightforward in some ways and in others it has a lot going on just beneath the surface. It feels about as removed from the generic high budget videogame as it gets these days without going into the realm of indie low-budget. There's some weird throwback energy going on here is what I am saying and over the next few hundred words I will attempt to put said thoughts in some kind of coherent order. To the commentary...
Post a Comment
more>>>