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A loving spoonful of promising new releases that prove flatter is better.
With the normal five-year console cycle slowed to a crawl thanks to rising development costs and sluggish economies, the big hardware makers are eager to freshen up business by forcing new add-ons down our throats. And hey, maybe the world will be awesome once motion controls are universal. 3D visualization, though? Oh, it’s fine when 3D is integral to the hardware, as with Nintendo’s 3DS. But the idea that we’ll have to buy new TVs and wear silly glasses in order to play games that look terrible to everyone not wearing their own glasses doesn’t sit well with a lot of gamers.
Maybe that’s why we were all so excited by all the push-back we saw at this year’s E3. For every game that trumpeted its amazing 3D effects, we were just as likely to see a cool-looking game that rejected the 3D trend by going all the way in the other direction: Total 2D. This may well be the year that 2D graphics make their big comeback, and we can’t complain. People still love 2D games — just look at how well New Super Mario Bros. Wii has sold compared to Super Mario Galaxy 2! — and now that more and more developers are finally catching on to the fact that you can still make a cool, innovative game without polygons and three-dimensional depth, the upcoming roster of sweet-looking 2D games is looking better than it has since the early ’90s. Now, however, we have high-definition resolutions, massive processing power, and nearly two decades of maturation in game design to make this next wave of 2D games even more enjoyable than their 16-bit antecedents.
