Retro City Rampage
Did I Pay For It: No
Platforms: PSN / Vita / Windows / Xbox 360 / WiiWare / 3DS
I’ve been gaming for two and a half decades. If I think about it, I haven’t even been potty trained that long. I played games before I rode a bike, kissed my first girl, danced my first jig, or wrote my first word. A controller is as familiar to my hands as a rifle to a rifleman.
Because of this, I’m intimately acquainted with video game lore; the princess being in another castle, that guard in “Metal Gear” who “feels asleep”, the hollow and oddly chilling whisper of the “Mario Brothers 3” warp whistle (and accompanying tornado), and the nearly limitless list goes on and on. “Retro City Rampage” — a thoroughly enjoyable top-down open-world sandbox game using 8-bit NES style graphics — is fluent in game lore from the 8-bit era.
And I mean fluent. Sure, using a retro graphical style is nothing new these days. Besides “Retro City Rampage”, “Fez”, “Megaman 9” (and 10), “Cave Story” and the so-pretentious-I-shopped-at-whole-foods-for-a-week-after-playing-it “Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP”, all used sprite-based graphics to varying degrees of success. However, “Retro City Rampage” does things a bit differently, drawing (more or less) from the same 64-color palette that the NES had, which is really quite neat for the geekiest game fans among us.
