Ye olde video games of yore. 2D vs 3D.

Gamespot.com recently put up a fun video of editors and writers discussing what old game franchises they would like to see come back. A lot of good names were batted around: Blaster Master, Fire Shark, and Earthbound. Some more obvious ones as well: Chrono Trigger, Mike Tyson's Punch Out!!, Panzer Dragoon, and the Baldur's Gate series. Gamespot's Associate Hardware Editor, Sarju Shah, mentioned one of my more favorite games: River City Ransom. I was surprised that no one dug up Ikari Warriors. Man, that was a fun game back in the day.

But all of this gaming nostalgia got me thinking. There have been some old and long revered franchises that have been resurrected. Final Fight: Streetwise is a goods example. Well, not "good" as in a good game, but as an example of old franchises being born again. Unfortunately, FF: Streetwise was regarded as horrible and was largely panned by nearly everyone. Metroid is another example. This franchise was kind of buried aways. Once Nintendo decided to blow off the dust and make a few new titles, everyone went nuts for it. However, Shanker Srinivasan (Sports Editor), asks for a new 2D Metroid.

I know the trend is to go to 3D with all these new games. In the new series you've got the Metroid Prime's that are now a first person shooter and stuff like that. But, frankly, I think that some games in some series should always stay 2D.
- Source

Which is an interesting point. Fans of the Street Fighter series nearly hemorrhaged when they heard that Street Fighter IV was going 3D. Later, more details were released that it's fighting was to be kept linear. Though the background may shift, you cannot actually move freely throughout the environment. This is often referred to as 2.5D. Still, some hardcore fans are drastically pissed off about the use of 3D models instead of sprites. Meanwhile, King of Fighters XII has gone the completely opposite, using 100% hand drawn sprites. Everything is hand drawn, given to a color illustrator that colors it in Photoshop and then the sprite is handed off to the animation team. Wow! Now that's laborious! Even though Street Fighter has gone to 3D models, the "hand drawn sprite" look and feel has been kept in place with some very excellent cell and specular shading. The animation is also extremely fluid and terrifically well done.

Street Fighter IV


King of Fighters XII


Watching the two different videos is like night and day. Yes, KoF XII looks absolutely amazing for a hand drawn game. (XII footage does not begin until 0:26, all the previous was former KoF games) And maybe this has to do with recording devices that were used (I doubt it, though), but Street Fighter IV still looks much, much more fluid. The visuals also seem to "pop" much more than KoF XII.

All of this boils down to this weird thing of nostalgia. Some of the old NES, Super NES, Genesis, Saturn, etc. games were good. Some are, even to this day, incredibly well-made and really tons of fun. That is called excellent game mechanics and well designed gameplay. A lot of games nowadays seem to rely of a lot of flash with very little substance. But I think there resides this place in our minds where we are still 12, or 8, or 16, or whatever, and we remember the fun we had with those games. Most of those games, if we were to play them today, probably wouldn't even come close to comparing how much better some of the games of today are. Which is exactly what has killed 2D.

My theory is that many developers shy away from 2D thinking that it will be like a bad trip down memory lane. (kind of like remembering Marble Madness as lots of fun, only to replay it and and go, "good god, this sucks!") Have developers forsaken 2D as some sort of "nostalgia" methodology of gameplay, suitable for cheap XBox Live! Arcade, PS Network, Wii Play, and handhelds, but not to ever be applied to new console franchises? While many games do benefit greatly from 3D, what ever happened to fun game genres like the side-scrolling beat-em up? Streets of Rage was hugely popular. Could we ever see a resurgence of 2D games? I seriously doubt it. Some games will probably stay within the faux-2D realm: some fighting games, shooters, and many traditional RPGs work well in 2.5D, but will we ever see a bring back of hand done sprites for major console and arcade releases? I have a feeling KoF XII will be the last of its kind.