New Indie Games That Prove Old School “16 Bit” Is Making a Comeback

It’s not just that you can play SNES games on your Android now with an emulator that’s making old style games come back into vogue on all of the awesome new phones that you can upgrade to these days like the Moto X.

 It’s also the huge influx of Indie games in places like KickStarter and Indiegogo that are revitalizing old school gamer graphics. It just goes to show that there’s a reason why many people vote a 16 bit game- Chrono Trigger the best video game of all time.

People love the whole package in games-music, mood, and writing, way more than they care about how great the graphics are ultimately. And now that indie gamers have been let loose on the world, we are probably going to see this more and more- the experience of video games being emphasized over just mere spectacle.

Here are a few examples of this happening right now.

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HyperLight Drifter

This game is like Chrono Trigger meets the Terminator? Sound awesome?

It is-

A better comparison in terms of gameplay would be like a Link to the Past. Imagine playing Chrono Trigger, but instead of the whole RPG choose your attack thing, you hit a button to swing your sword, hit a button to fire your ‘hardlight” cannon, and so on. I admit I always wondered what some of the more awesome RPG titles would be like they had more of an open action-RPG approach. In my incredibly humble opinion Action RPG is the best game type.

And God, this game looks so unique. It has the whole post-apocalyptic vibe going on, with huge robotic and bio-monsters, and a real lone-hero-with-cape feel. Everything is monolithic looking, like in Shadows of the Collosus, but with more of a sci fi feel.

Hyperlight is still on Kickstarter still as of the time of this posting, and will be for a few more weeks.

Here's a comparison that might look familiar.

      Hyperlight with a campfire loner feel.

  ChronoTrigger, with a campfire team feel. It almost looks like Magus (the purple cloak guy on the right) should migrate up into the top loner screenshot.

Mighty Number 9

If haunting post-apocalyptic sci-fi isn’t your speed, how about a happy Japanimation megaman clone? Mighty No. 9 might not be technically 16-bit, but it’s definitely done in an original 16 bit sidescroller style. It looks like they’re going to stick with some of the stuff that Made MegaMan fun back in the day, but with weird cool stuff added in like being able to turn into random tools.

Apparently you’ll be able to steal some “cell” energy after beating enemies and store it, using it when you’re fighting even harder bosses later on to do cool stuff like fill the screen with fire, or do tons of punches, so it’s keeping the strategy from Megaman and raising the stakes. It might even come to Nintendo 3DS at some point, which would look super fantastic.

Crystal Kingdom

Crystal Kingdom is taking old school JRPG and adding in the MMO for some great letter combinations. That’s right, instead of just have 2 or 3 friends jump in on an SNES type RPG game, you can play with the entire Internet!

You can play for free since it’s currently in open Beta.

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It really makes you wonder just how awesome retro 16 bit games are going to get. Maybe we'll start 16 bit-ifying modern games. A 16 bit RPG version of CoD would be sweet maybe?