"manliness (noun): Fighting a giant space centipede while entering Earth's atmosphere."

Over the last year, a new trend has gained popularity with game developers. I’m talking about new games made in the style (both graphically and in terms of gameplay) of “retro games”. On North American shores, it would seem that “Mega Man 9″ started the retro movement. However, in Japan, the country where such games originate, Konami’s “Gradius ReBirth” was released almost a month earlier.

The reverting of the Gradius franchise into an “old school” style was apparently successful enough to not only spawn “Contra ReBirth”, but also “Castlevania: The Adventure ReBirth” and “Salamander ReBirth” (according to recent ESRB ratings and filed trademarks).  Is a game intentionally made to look and play like something a decade or two old worth the ten dollar price tag? Let’s find out!

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"2D is back in business!"

We are seeing a glorious return of the 2D Fighter genre lately. Games like “BlazBlue”, “Street Fighter IV” (the graphics may be 3D, but it’s the gameplay that counts), the upcoming “Tatsunoko vs. Capcom”, the digital release of “Marvel vs. Capcom 2″, and “The King of Fighters XII” are breathing new life into what seemed like a diminishing genre.

The King of Fighters XI (ps2) was relatively well received when it released in 2007. It had a variety of modes, both single-player and multiplayer, and had a very large character roster. But, just as Marvel vs. Capcom 2 ripped a large portion of its assets from previous fighters (like 1995′s Marvel Super-Heroes), KOFXI was able to pack in so many characters by taking their assets from a combination of previous entries in the series and other SNK games.

This leads me to my first point of discussion: The King of Fighters XII, though it is the latest entry in the series, has less than half the number of characters that XI has. Why this is surprising to anyone is beyond me. Every character had to be painstakingly redrawn in High Definition from scratch, since ripping sprites from previous entries was no longer an option. Yes, there are a lot of characters not present in KOFXII that I miss, but the characters that made the cut feel as solid as ever, and there are already talks to add more via DLC.

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"Memories..."

“Castlevania: Symphony of the Night”, “Super Metroid”, “Contra”, and “Super Mario Bros.”  What do these games have in common? Well, besides being some of the best selling and most critically acclaimed games of all time, they were all in glorious 2-D.

These relics of the past still hold up remarkably well, even alongside today’s Unreal 3 powered behemoths. The reason is simple; 2-D games are able to capture a part of gaming that today’s games simply cannot match.

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