Worst Game of 2014: Shovel Knight

[Damned Registrations]

... more voice lines, online play, etc.

If a game offers nothing new, then the only thing it has to boast as its selling point is that it has nothing new. In other words, nostalgic. It doesn't impress me. Also, pixel art is so damn easy to make, it also doesn't impress me at all. But feel free to pretend I like Ass Creed or that I'm a moron for disliking "nostalgic" games. Pfft.

Ah yes, more voice acting (because spending the voice acting budget on a writer for decent dialogue would be a sin). Another bit of modern gaming that is truly glorious. Any more of these things you want to worship:

• Always online DRM
• Incomplete games requiring paid DLC to be decent
• A total lack of difficulty so even people who've never played a game before can win without ever being frustrated
• Incoherently pandering to as broad an audience as possible instead of a niche with specific desires
• Mandatory tutorials for incredibly obvious shit
• Pay to win mechanics in multiplayer

But no, truly pixel graphics are one the the WORST trends in modern gaming. None of the above things, or QTEs or cutscenes are worse than blocky graphics.

Nevermind that your basic premise (that something like Skullgirls, or any 2D game honestly; isn't driven by nostaligia as much as shovel knight) is a complete load of shit. You know what had nothing going for it but nostaliga and was a total piece of crap? MMX. Fucking game sucked balls in many ways, and all the new mechanics you're so fond of made it worse. It was dumbed down with fewer stats, enemies, spells and locations than the games it was trying to ape, all for the sake of appeasing retards like you that demanded it have shitty 3D graphics that take more time to make, shitty voice acting that takes more time to make, and a bunch of other useless 'features' like some godawful Uplay requirement. No time to balance game mechanics guys, team is busy trying to fix a bug with the ambient noise levels in one of the forgettable dungeons.

Shovel Knight didn't get acclaim purely for nostalgia, it had tight mechanics, good aesthetics and didn't piss away it's entire budget on shit nobody but the marketing team really wanted. So what if the mechanics were used in other games as well? Should we call all games that use mouselook shit because it's been done before and they're just aping the past? Mechanics should be judged on their own merits, not their relation to your edgy too-hip-for-hipsters taboo list.

 

[Athelas]

Ah yes, more voice acting (because spending the voice acting budget on a writer for decent dialogue would be a sin). Another bit of modern gaming that is truly glorious. Any more of these things you want to worship:

Voice acting is a perfectly fine addition for even a low-budget game provided it has little dialogue, i.e. a platformer. Sound design is an important aspect of games. Hiring an expensive writer also doesn't equal good dialogue (see: Bioware).

all for the sake of appeasing retards like you that demanded it have shitty 3D graphics that takes more time to make

Uh what? 2d art is both more expensive and less flexible than 3d.

 

[Farage]

No hes right, 3D does take longer to make.
I mean, it really depends what you're doing, but when talking traditional game assets, 3D is more expensive and takes longer

You have to wait until an attack completes in midair before you can do the bouncy thing? Also redefining keys in the options menu redefines them when navigating the options menu while you are still redefining keys? Mongoloids made this game

You idiots weren't even born yet in the 8 bit era, what do you have to be nostalgic for? Be honest for once in your lives

I wasn't born by the time many games it took inspiration from were released, but i still enjoyed the game.
I don't get it, do i need to be born in those times to recognize a good game?

I also had no problem with the interface or air control in the game, are you sure it isn't your computer?

 

[Athelas]

No hes right, 3D does take longer to make.
I mean, it really depends what you're doing, but when talking traditional game assets, 3D is more expensive and takes longer

I should've said it depends on the type of game. How many 2d open-world games are there? I remember Pillars of Eternity had a graph showing most of the budget was dedicated to environment art; meanwhile the Wasteland 2 devs announced they only spent a fraction of its budget on graphics.

Also see my point about flexibility. Stuff like elevation and destructible scenery are far easier to implement in a 3d environment than they are in a 2d one.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Probably not cheaper than:

DEFINITELY not cheaper than:

And I could care less about 'flexibility'. The fact that I can zoom in and spin around units in Civ doesn't make the crappy brown indistinguishable units look any better while actually playing the game.

Isn't PoE trying to do the whole pre rendered 2d background painting thing from the IE games? Of course that shit would cost a ton. Still probably cheaper than 3d with anywhere near as much detail.

On the voice acting thing: it depends entirely on the amount of dialogue and the budget. For a game with a budget as low as shovel knight with as much dialogue (there are towns with people to talk to etc.) it'd be a serious drain. Even for a game with much higher budget like Dust: An Elysian Tale, it was clearly a large drain, given how sloppy the writing was and how generally bad the mechanics and gameplay and such was. Recording a voice is easy. Voicing grunts for the character getting hit or whatever is great. Recording a voice again every time you need to edit dialogue, or writing dialogue all at the very end after everything else in the game is set in stone, that shit isn't easy. That shit is a nightmare.

 

[Phage]

Men why was Shovel Knight such an actually perfect game?

 

[adrix89]

We have seen before that it's perfectly possible to make an old-fashioned game with new mechanics/art-style (examples: Dust, Skullgirls).

Speaking of Skullgirls don't their characters cost 200k apiece? How the fuck is that affordable?

No hes right, 3D does take longer to make.
I mean, it really depends what you're doing, but when talking traditional game assets, 3D is more expensive and takes longer

2D animation is God tier
3D is easier to animate but the animations look like shit.
2D skeletal animations are the shittiest
3D environmental art is a huge drain on time/money compare to just drawing.
Pixel art is dirt cheap all around but can look good.

 

[Damned Registrations]

I'm not too familiar with Skullgirls but having played Dust I can say that it's definitely not in the same category of budget as shovel knight, and it had some very tepid gameplay all around. Comparing the two is a perfect example of wasting resources on making things look pretty at the expense of making an actual game.

I like pretty 2d animations as much as the next guy, but if it means you're not spending enough time testing and reworking the mechanics until they're awesome, your efforts are being put in the wrong place.

 

[Athelas]

Dust's issues had less to do with 2d art and more to do with hiring a furry enthusiast from DeviantArt to design said art (while simultaneously letting him write the story).

 

[Damned Registrations]

I think if the art were cheaper there'd have been a greater variety of enemies, locations, and character abilities. And I think the story would have been written better if it weren't voiced, since that would allow for a lot more editing.

Or obviously if they'd had a larger budget. But thats never really an option. The budget is what it is. It's how it gets used that counts.

 

[AlexOfSpades]

Ah yes, more voice acting (because spending the voice acting budget on a writer for decent dialogue would be a sin). Another bit of modern gaming that is truly glorious. Any more of these things you want to worship:

• Always online DRM
• Incomplete games requiring paid DLC to be decent
• A total lack of difficulty so even people who've never played a game before can win without ever being frustrated
• Incoherently pandering to as broad an audience as possible instead of a niche with specific desires
• Mandatory tutorials for incredibly obvious shit
• Pay to win mechanics in multiplayer

What kind of idiotic fallacy is this? "Oh you like voice acting? I bet you like this totally unrelated list of shit, too!" It didn't work when you implied I like Ass Creed (spoiler alert: I don't), and it doesn't work now. Voice acting is a storytelling device and fleshes out the personalities of characters, and has nothing to do with whatever unethical bullshit big companies pull off nowadays. And it's perfectly possible to spend the budget on both voice acting & dialogue. Pretending you can have one or the other is being dumb for the sake of an argument. Ever heard of the game where my avatar comes from?

Skullgirls' characters cost so much because its a fighting game, which requires a fuckton of sprites (specially for a six buttons game). For a platformer you'd need 1/10 of the total number of sprites. It's totally possible to have a game with decent art and be on a budget. This isn't the fucking 90's anymore, pixel art is not the only way you can make an indie game. The reason they used pixel art is because they think it's trendy and cool and nostalgic, and to some people it is (perhaps most) but to me it looks lazy and lame. In regards to Dust, let's not forget the game was made by a single individual. I'm sure if he had more people on board, he could've implemented more enemies and variety. Of course that if he had downgraded the animation quality to two frames per second of animation and 16x16 sprites he could've made the game last much longer, but who cares? It would've looked like ass.

According to Farage the gameplay is good and I respect him, so if he says it's good it must be. That's what matters mostly, right? But the "nostalgic pixel art" style still makes me roll my eyes. Let's please not pretend they were forced to do that. I'm sure they could've used different art styles. There are billions of other examples of indie games based on classic genres other than the two i said earlier - there's Abyss Odyssey, there's Binding of Isaac, the list goes on and on. We can cherry-pick them and say "oh that game sucks because it lacks X" but the argument remains - they don't look like ass because they had artists on board. Good artists, and not pixel-art-drawing, rose-tinted-glasses-wearing hipster little bitches that own Zelda shirts and suck Mario's dick every morning.

 

[vonAchdorf]

In all fairness, it does offer new mechanics, its a modern twist in retro games.
Somehow it managed to rise from the endless sea of artsy garbage indie devs keep putting on the shelf and it wasn't for no reason.
As the game progresses it gets more and more original, delivering new mechanics every single stage.
It's not just another retro copy bullshit, its a game that offers fun in different levels, using everything, like, really everything, from physics to npcs to keep the "fun wheel" turning.
I too am tired of seeing pixel art bullshit, but this one is an exception. A good one.

But of course that, if you're not a fan of platformers, you're not gonna like it, which is your case specifically Alex.

Oh and holy fucking balls, the soundtrack. Holy shit the soundtrack.

I think part of its success is that they didn't make a retro looking game to cover up lacking artistic skill & direction. The took "retro" seriously and tried to work along the restrictions of the NES (you probably know their article ("Breaking the NES for Shovel Knight") on Gamasutra of all sites). And like you said, they not only improved "retro" technically when it made sense for them, they also added new ideas, but not without a concept.

 

[Farage]

The reason why its marketed as a nostalgia game, its because it makes you feel like you're playing an actual old game you've never heard about, i remember seeing a very detailed explanation on how they were toning down the quality on purpose just to pass nostalgia.
They were very dedicated to give the feel of "good times" that the devs probably shared among themselves.
If you search on the internet right now, you will find an original soundtrack and a conversed soundtrack for the game, Jake Kaufman uploaded a series of videos where he shows the Famitracker version of each Shovel Knight song, like, that shit is so fucking hard to make, you guys have no idea. Famitracker is a tool of the devil.
Same thing went for the art, the original art had a lot of details on it, while the "final version" ones had limited colors only to give the right feel to it.

You see where im getting at?
Cock-sucking hipsters like Phil Fish does pixel art cause it's trendy, easier and cheaper. "blawlks r kewl" -said the whining baby
He wasn't evoking nostalgia, he was just being a blind ignorant fuck following the trends.

Shovel knight is like a ride on a rollercoaster, it's pretty scary to get on it, but its pretty fucking good once you're there.
I won't deny many retro 8 bit platformers are the cause of the bad pixel fame, but it would be lying to say that Shovel Knight is bad just because its nostalgic.
After all, "nostalgia", in its purest word form, is something good. The opposite is simply called "trauma".

Again, it was a fun game, not the addictive kinda type though, just fun. The ones i remember playing with friends at their places when i was a kid.

 

[Damned Registrations]

If you think Binding of Isaac looks better than Shovel Knight you have pretty shit taste.

In regards to the list of crap, it's no fallacy at all. You laud Dust as being a good game but it's guilty of half the shit I listed. It's painfully easy, has a ton of mandatory cutscenes for a platformer, forces a bunch of tutorial shit on you in case you didn't realize jumping might be a thing you can do. Do you bitch about those things though? No, you go around and bitch about games with graphics in too low of a resolution. Priorities detected. Fucking bravo.

Of course that if he had downgraded the animation quality to two frames per second of animation and 16x16 sprites he could've made the game last much longer, but who cares? It would've looked like ass.

Yeah, because there are only two kinds of games: 8 bit nostalgic indies, and triple-A piles of shit by Ubisoft. No middle ground at all, right?

So now there are only two kinds of games: those with flowing 12 sprite high rez animations and those that are from the 80's. That sure as fuck didn't take long.

If shovel knight looked like Dust, it'd be about 1/10th the size. But who cares right, it'd look pretty!

 

[Tehdagah]

By the art style alone I can say Dust has shitty hitboxes.

 

[AlexOfSpades]

If you think Binding of Isaac looks better than Shovel Knight you have pretty shit taste.

In regards to the list of crap, it's no fallacy at all. You laud Dust as being a good game but it's guilty of half the shit I listed. It's painfully easy, has a ton of mandatory cutscenes for a platformer, forces a bunch of tutorial shit on you in case you didn't realize jumping might be a thing you can do. Do you bitch about those things though? No, you go around and bitch about games with graphics in too low of a resolution. Priorities detected. Fucking bravo.

I was talking about art style. So i'm supposed to go on a rant about how Dust is too easy when talking about its art style? You think I "bitch" about it being easy or short? I dislike that, yes. But when talking about the art style, I do like Dust's for its art style. And Skullgirls, and Abyss Odyssey, and the list goes on. Better than just another pixel art piece of shit? Much better. But naturally, that's my opinion. If you don't like Dust's art style then its alright, its your opinion. But saying that I must like Ass Creed or must "worship" some random bullshit just because I have a different opinion, then it becomes obvious that you're not used to other people liking different things, and assuming they must be the videogame equivalent of Hitler. What a waste of everyone's time.

If shovel knight looked like Dust, it'd be about 1/10th the size. But who cares right, it'd look pretty!

If Fallout was pixel art instead of pre-rendered 3d, it would've lasted ten times more, too. And so would have Deus Ex. Both games are guilty of having voice actors. Ugh, popamole crap! In fact, they should've been just text-based games. All the budget would've gone to writing. All of it. What a magnificent experience it would have been!

Wait, you like Fallout's graphics? Graphics whore. I bet you play Assassin's Creed, too.

 

[Gozma]

Has anyone figured out how to get x360ce to work properly with Shovel Knight (in my case so I can use a PS3 arcade stick for it)? I can get a ps3 pad working fine for Dark Souls with x360ce but Shovel Knight steadfastly refuses to cooperate.

Edit - wrt the thread Shovel Knight looks really good, it is not a shitpixel

 

[adrix89]

If Fallout was pixel art instead of pre-rendered 3d, it would've lasted ten times more, too. And so would have Deus Ex. Both games are guilty of having voice actors.

Comparing the big titles from yesteryear to the budget of an indie game...
Sure if an Indie project manage to scrap up a decent budget they have more options on art styles.
But if they don't have a budget they have to make due with cheaper alternatives, pixel art, flash shit, RPG Maker shit, paper dolls.

 

[A user named cat]

I don't really see the point in all these retro pixel games even existing, it isn't like there's a void that needs filling compared to our need of new GOOD RPGs since we've all played the best classics. There are thousands of C64, Amiga, 8/16-bit and various other games that can easily be emulated or purchased used off ebay if you want to retro game. My ZX Spectrum rom collection alone is over 5,500 games that I'll never get through, not to mention Commodore which has over 10,000 games and counting. Garbage like Binding of Isaac, Super Meat Boy, Shovelware Knight and all of them offer absolutely nothing that you already can't get from older gen consoles and computers. Emulators are not rocket science and used systems are cheap nowadays. I guarantee none of these Phil Fishermen have ever even played 2% of actual retro games to warrant needing *new* retro shit.

Instead of playing Mega Pixels Run Right Gravity Gimmickery: Part 5, these people could be playing Cleve classics. Come on.

 

[Metro]

Worst? No. Most overrated? Possibly.

 

[Damned Registrations]

I don't really see the point in all these retro pixel games even existing, it isn't like there's a void that needs filling compared to our need of new GOOD RPGs since we've all played the best classics. There are thousands of C64, Amiga, 8/16-bit and various other games that can easily be emulated or purchased used off ebay if you want to retro game. My ZX Spectrum rom collection alone is over 5,500 games that I'll never get through, not to mention Commodore which has over 10,000 games and counting.

Start playing those games and you'll be begging for all the flappy bird you can get your hands on. 99(.99)% of everything being crap isn't a new phenomenon, and if you're going to limit what you play to what was made in the 80's, you're going to be missing out on a lot of the best shit, just from a statistical point of view.

I don't want to play 'some oldschool games' I want to play 'the best oldschool games'.

Played through a bit of Shovel Knight earlier- it really is quite solid. The secrets are well done, it's not completely linear, and the boss fights have been pretty cool. Difficulty is ok too, if you're willing to abstain from chugging healing potions.

 

[A user named cat]

Start playing those games and you'll be begging for all the flappy bird you can get your hands on. 99(.99)% of everything being crap isn't a new phenomenon, and if you're going to limit what you play to what was made in the 80's, you're going to be missing out on a lot of the best shit, just from a statistical point of view.

Start playing those games? I'm one of the content contributors at Emumovies. Meaning I've played a ton of them in order to record and submit footage. What's funny is I have the same retarded username as you over there, what a world.

Perhaps you should start playing those games yourself if you honestly think Amiga, Genesis, NES, Spectrum and C64 don't have tons of games vastly superior to Flappy Birds and Shovelware. Who said just the 80's? Did the 90's not exist in your bizarro realm? Um, okay. What exactly is so difficult about weeding out the duds and playing the gems though? Obviously every system ever has had many bad apples.

If you want to play the best old school games, then play actual old fucking school games. Not pixel art hipster games made by 20 year old Canadians who mimmick games they didn't even play themselves. Do you need a helping hand or penis crutch?

http://www.64apocalypse.com/bestever1.htm

http://www.lemonamiga.com/games/votes_list.php

http://www.worldofspectrum.org/tbosg/

http://www.retro-sanctuary.com/Top-100-Megadrive-Games-Page-1.html

 

[Admiral jimbob]

Shovel Knight is good.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Jesus christ the 3rd game on that genesis list is fucking Cool Spot. If that's your definition of a good game you are fucking brain damaged.

 

[Gozma]

On playing this vs. late '80s-early '90s emulated stuff: Widescreen helps a lot. Also personal taste thing but I really don't like normal international NES music (some of the sounds they use annoy the shit out of me) but VRC6 stuff sounds fantastic (although Shovel Knight is not as good as Jap Castlevania 3 by a lot).

Also anyone that had trouble with the controller thing: I went into Steam's Big Picture mode and set up my controller in that and it started working in Shovel Knight, hooray