I spent hours playing Duke Nukem when I was a kid. Based on my son's love for absolutely idiotic games, and the assumption that I was like him at his age, that may or may not say anything for its quality, but I have fond memories of it.
Amazingly nobody mentioned it yet, but around Christmas the leak of the 2001 DNF build came to some fruition with the release of the "first slice" from the DNF restoration project. If you liked Duke Nukem 3D, this will be a treat for you. It has that certain personality and charm that was long lost by the time DNF 2011 came out. You can download it for free on moddb: https://www.moddb.com/mods/dnf2001-restoration-project
What I'd love to see is a leak of the original "Prey". Not the id Tech 4-powered shooter by Human Head Studios, but the 3D Realms one.
So many stories about this one. At least 3 generations of creatives, a KMFDM soundtrack, a perhaps over-ambitious heavily portals-based engine, destructible environments, later engine work by Corinne Yu, etc.
Edit: Oh wow! I just googled for a YouTube video of the 199x E3 demos to link here, and the 1995 version apparently did leak days ago: https://archive.org/details/prey-1195/
The level of detail and the dynamic portals were just so cool at the time. The demos from about 4:00 onward and especially at 5:00 onward more or less predict the later gameplay of Valve's Portal games.
Looks a lot like Abuse. I would have played it! The original Duke Nukem sidescrollers were fun. Them and Commander Keen, Dangerous Dave, Jazz Jackrabbit... what else?
The Bitmap Brothers, one of the finest games developers of all time, I'm of an age to remember Xenon 2 and Speedball 2 on the Atari ST, total classics.
SpaceVenture from the ex-Sierra Space Quest developers took 10+ years on Kickstarter. Easier to slip deadlines when you don’t have a studio making external commitments.
> The jump from single-screen or flip-screen graphics to scrolling graphics during the golden age of arcade games was a pivotal leap in game design, comparable to the move to 3D graphics during the fifth generation.
> Smooth scrolling on IBM PCs in software was a challenge for developers.
Killing Gameshow was one of my fave games as a kid, beautiful graphics and amazing sound on the Amiga. Never see it mentioned anywhere so had to chime in.
2D side scrolling games were still popular in browser Flash games until the mid 2000s. I remember playing a few of them on Miniclip and other websites. Shoutout to anyone who remembers Bonus.com around the year 2000. The website was an ad infested mess, but also home to some decent games.
I’m not sure if it is at the same level though. Both in terms of how mainstream they are and the calibre/size of the development studios behind them. I can’t off the top of my head think of a modern “AAA” sidescroller.
Not sure if Wii U is modern, but since it's on Switch too...
Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze? That's 100% a triple A 2D platformer, with incredible graphics, some damn impressive level design that takes advantage of multiple foreground layers and numerous interconnected level specific mechanics and one of the best soundtracks in recent times.
Aside the name, what does make Metroid Dread a triple-A title, though? After playing Blasphemous, Huntdown, Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth, and a few others for the past year, I can't say Metroid Dread has a distinctive trait that would make it standing out as AAA. The competition from indie studios is tough nowadays, many of them release AAA-grade titles without labelling them as such.
“AAA” refers to any game made by a larger publisher with a large budget. The general sentiment is they have large budgets so higher expectations are reasonable.
Wikipedia edit history [1] suggests the definition has been a matter of some debate, but the current definition has more or less been static since a few months after the article was created; i.e. high costs, high-profile and high-expectations.
By that definition, a AA game could definitely look better than an AAA game, although it would be unexpected. On the other hand, BioWare's recent titles and the entire Cyberpunk 2077 debacle seems to have shaken things up quite a bit and many people now seem to have have _lower_ expectations on AAA titles, because the major players aren't trusted to release good titles worth their money.
> By that definition, a AA game could definitely look better than an AAA game,
Of course...?
> although it would be unexpected.
No it wouldn't; that would be completely normal. I didn't say AAA meant attractive graphics. I said it meant current-generation graphics. Compare a screenshot of Escape from Monkey Island to one of Curse of Monkey Island. No one is going to argue that Escape looks better. But if you released a beautiful 2D-animated game in 2000, that wouldn't be "current" technology.
AAA used to simply imply good graphics. These days it tends to refer to that and the hand-craftedness of things. Like every moment being designed for some player impact. The new Tomb Raiders are the most emblematic of this imo, though not in a good way. AAA games tend not to feel like a set of standard mechanics and actors arranged in different levels. They have a lot more special circumstances. Worst case this is just cut scenes. Commonly it's special control schemes for specific situations that break the standard game design and may be cool or may suck. I haven't played any of these titles, including Metroid so I can't comment. But... idk Hollow Knight was an excellent 2d side scroller with beautiful art that was clearly not AAA to no detriment, imo. Nintendo does things their own way too so it's always funky.
In my headcannon this transitioned most clearly with the cultural shift of Halo 3 being AAA to CoD4 being AAA.
Often, yeah, but it doesn't feel like that's what people mean by it in this comment chain.
For a specific example, I would say that the recently announced Hades 2 is an AAA roguelike, even though it isn't trying to be michael-bay-tier in the graphics department at all. Disclaimer: not to be confused with artstyle and the overall visual presentation, both of which were just fantastic in the original Hades, and I expect just as much from Hades 2.
Lol that game makes me so stressed. When the robot shows up I experience dread, so mission accomplished. I had to stop playing it after awhile I just didn’t find the “Dread” parts fun. I’ll go play something less stressful like Elden Ring.
They really don't have to be "AAA" to be a decent product. My nieces and nephew(ages 4-6) are all playing a Hotel Transylvania app on their tablets, which is a pretty straightforward collectathon platformer with a gajillion levels and a three-star ranking to encourage them to speedrun it. There are a lot of games like it, but as a plain-vanilla flavor of platformer it definitely does the job, and those kinds of games are F2P and generally well produced, with plenty of animation; the mobile market has some of the most extravagant budgets for 2D gaming, it just doesn't read as "premium" because of the business model and positioning.
When we go upmarket from that it's more often a sidestep into indie games, which can address a specific niche better.
The last two installments of Mario had 2D sections and prior to that Nintendo had several releases of 2D Mario games used as launch games for their platforms.
I vaguely remember seeing a black and white screenshot of this in the back of a 3D Realms manual/cd-booklet (possibly for another 3D Realms game, or for the Macintosh release of Duke Nukem 3D which would have released after development on Duke Nukem Forever was underway).
I love seeing prototype and prerelease builds leak. I can only hope the binders full of discs at Harmonix follow that same fate some day in the future.
https://dukenukem.fandom.com/wiki/Duke_Nukem_I