Confession time: I've yet to play Mega Man 9 or Wario Land: Shake It!. Both games arrived in the UK earlier today, and I've not found the time to pick up either, much less play them. I know that I'll purchase and enjoy both titles, because I've always had a fondness for 2D games, but I also know I'll prefer the elaborate, hand-drawn art to be found in Wario Land: Shake It!
I'm not exactly opposed to Mega Man 9 mining the past for its visuals, but I'm constantly puzzled by the universally positive response to Capcom's use of 1988-era pixels. This may sound like heresy, but isn't it sort of pointless?
Whereas Shake It! offers us something that is visually fresh, Mega Man 9 serves up something that we already have available to us on the Virtual Console (and, you know, on the NES) and as such is the worst kind of retro fetishism, the kind that is celebrated only by those with their rose-tinted spectacles fastened too tightly. It's an approach that totally ignores the advances made in 2D visuals, all for the sake of paying some kind of redundant tribute to the past.
In an age when modern gaming hardware can effortlessly generate visuals like those seen in Shake It!, who would want to look backwards? Throughout his latest adventure, Wario grins and gurns his way through several levels of truly unique art. Layers and layers of parallax-scrolling backgrounds smoothly interact with one another. Enemies adopt scores upon scores of expressions. The result? A graphical style with buckets of character.
While producing such a game is more labor-intensive for developers, the result is infinitely more engaging to look at. It's like playing through one of the Saturday morning cartoons of my childhood, a prospect that delights my inner man-child. Sure, there's a novelty and a charm to how Mega Man 9 looks, but I always found that initial appeal rubbed off by the time the five-hour mark has passed in a Mega Man game (and that will happen, given the difficulty of Mega Man 9).
I'd love to see Capcom announce Mega Man 10, but I'd be really impressed if the company adopted a Shake It! (or, okay, Metal Slug) visual style for the Blue Bomber's next outing.
