NightFright, on 09 September 2020 - 01:07 PM, said:
I think it's because games just used to be more creative and immersive back in the days. With the limited resources available to devs, amazing titles were created.
What many forget is that back then tech was seen as a limitation.
Developers would have a vision and it would be crammed in to the limitations of the system, engine and staff output.
It was more about "How can we do this", programming and games were the canvas just like movies and music are.
Listening to old interviews you will find out that many good games which people mimic always started with an ambitious ideas that might even flat out ignore what a video game should or should not be, this resulted in some hit & miss solutions, but there is a reason why Duke3D was groundbreaking compared to all the other doom clones you had, it didn't have to be doom, just learn what works and what doesn't from it.
I feel many retro games get too caught on trying to directly cherry pick features to replicate from products of the past instead of augmenting their own stuff with them.
This results in many picks being low hanging fruits and it's like the tiresome 80s "synthwave" stuff where people picked few cliches and doubled down on it, kinda saying that 80s music was all about darker purple neon gridline patterns and thick sawtooth.
Another problem with cherrypicks is that the execution is usually just lazy, not respecting why something looked or sounded a certain way, It's like those VHS filter things that simply just apply unfocus and call it a day when there are a ton of more things under the hood that result in a quite different effect than you'd get with that.
They come off as just quick win crowdpleaser exploitation when not done properly.