Retro Gaming Steps Up the Retro with Surprising Street Fighter II
posted Friday Sep 1, 2017 by Scott Ertz
The last 12 months have been littered with retro gaming products. Nintendo released the NES Classic Edition and announced the upcoming Super NES Classic Edition. Sega, with partner AtGames, released the Classic and Flashback Genesis hardware. Even Atari has throwback hardware available.
For the 30th anniversary of Street Fighter II, Capcom and Retrotainment Games have decided to up the ante on throwback products, releasing a fully functional SNES cartridge. The cartridges come in either red or glow-in-the-dark, but the packages are not marked as to which color is in which box. The idea of making a working cartridge for hardware that is decades retired is a fascinating one, and the opposite of what we saw with the Genesis hardware. While Sega made new hardware that plays old games, this is a new cartridge for an old system.
This retro gaming trend is an interesting one, and proves that gaming does not have to focus completely on the graphics. In all of these cases, we are seeing companies release games, hardware or both, that are for technology that runs 8-bit or 16-bit graphics. These were the days when you couldn't spend all of your development time focusing on graphics, which meant you had to build a game that played well and could focus on story - or abandon it completely - dealer's choice.
Maybe, with the proof that a good game can do better than a pretty one, we will start to see good games released again.
